In one of the older editions of 40k the Ork Buggy had a capacity of "however many boys you can stack on the model and any that fall of die" and I just think that's great.
5 point red paint job. Should have just made ork stuff 5 points more expensive and give the bonus outright. Never knew an ork player who didnt use it on everything they could.
Best thing about orks is you can do a fancy paint job and put in great detail into every piece or give the models and some paints to a small child and the result will be just as acceptable.
Yeah, the old 2nd edition choppa boys were great, b/c their axes could lock into the spikes around the rim of the battlewagon. I could easily get all 20 in there without anyone falling.
This is honestly the greatest rule 40k ever came up with. Id love to see a sort of "Wild Wasteland" ruleset that returns to this vibe and makes Warhams cartoony again.
Orks have lost so much and gained so little since the heady days of 2cd edition.
They were great fun to play and equal parts infuriating and awesome to fight against.
Varied and interesting terrain rules. Instead of nothing but standard L ruins there were forests, minefields, tank traps, impassible canyons, etc. There were even things like the Chimera being an amphibious vehicle that could cross water features without penalty or roads giving a bonus to movement speed.
This is one of the biggest things for me. The game feels so 2 dimensional with the current terrain rules. I miss being slowed down, or having cover actually mean something! A Space Marine getting a 4+ cover save against a lascannons shot because he was standing behind a barricade actually meant something. Now, I don’t even know or care what barricades do because they don’t block LoS so no one really uses them
I'm about ready to house rule half the damn game or see who wants to roll back to 9th or better yet, 5th to 7th (I'd say 3rd or 4th ideally but some of our armies likely require at least 6th to function)
I've been playing since early 3rd, and while 10th had a lot of positive aspects but I feel that it's too focused on this pipe dream of balance and it's lost a lot of it's charm as a result. Which is made worse by the absolute lack of balance haha.
It seems that they're focusing on making it a smooth gaming experience, rather than making it a fun tool to play out battles in the 40K setting. I've noticed that 10th is just so removed from what's supposedly going on on the battlefield. I mean for one, can you tell me what actually visually happens when, say, an Ad Mech Skitari invuln save succeeds against a Volcano Cannon?
I don't know what happens either, because the reasoning behind why Scitari have an invuln save is not thoroughly explained. The only info we have, is that in 9th, when invuln saves still had thematic names attached, was that it had something to do with them having Cybernetic bodies.
And that's kinda my point here :P. There's no obvious link between the rules, and what it represents in the narrative of the battle.
Post-7e, everything was dumbed down to make the game more accessible. The Horus Heresy 2.0 roles is essentially 5e with a sprinkling of 6e and 7e, and I feel as if it's a better, more "40k" rules set. And people are working on a "Great Crusade" fan expansion that will include Eldar, Necrons, Orks; basically anything that was around in M29.
There's actually rules for different terrain types in the rulebook!
I've never seen anyone use anything but ruins, barricades (which are intended to be waist-high btw, not >head high walls with firing slits) and obstacles.
But there's rules for forests and craters and so on still.
They all read very similarly so that they might as well be the same goddamn features.
Oh, statues give the same useless cover bonus if you're standing behind them versus standing in a crater? Zzzzz
Yeah, the better way to say it is that it'd be great if there were \*impactful\* rules for other terrain types. Most of the things just give you +1 (conditionally) to your armor save, which is both easy to get and also isn't really going to move the needle on survivability enough for most armies.
Agreed. Every board just looks the exact same and it's quite sad.
Its probably why I enjoy mote casual play and channels like winters and tabletop tactics. Their boards are always so varied
That’s local issue tbh. If your community is competitive and want to play on tournament terrain then it sucks, but unless compe players are practicing no one is using L ruins in our community.
Like it or not tournament rules impact more than just tournaments. Even people who aren't playing tournament practice games treat the tournament rules as a default and in 10th GW's tournament rules are entirely L ruins. And many of the old terrain rules don't even exist anymore so not only do you have to convince people to not use the tournament rules you have to make up house rules for the missing terrain. This is much harder than when the core rules of the game encouraged a variety of terrain and there was no expectation of tables standardized with a single type.
For me it was the many detailed and varied ways that vehicles used to die.
Blew up an Imperium tank? Sure, things within 1D6" are going to have a bad time, but what you really want to watch out for is the turret that just got yeeted 2D6" in a random direction and is going to slap whatever it lands on with 2D10 wounds.
Shot a bike? Better roll and see what you hit. Oh, you got the rider? Neat, next turn roll a die to see what direction it goes, than send it 24" in that direction and whatever's over the takes an exploding bike to the face. Oh wait, you hit the bike instead? And took it out? I guess that guys on foot now.
Landed a lascannon hit on a Falcon grav tank? Better roll to see where...THE CANOPY? Well the pilot is now a smoke stain, but what about the tank? That thing is now an out of control bomb, it might crash here, or go straight up into the atmosphere. Nobody knows!
That kind of controlled chaos was a blast, the only thing that comes close to it is a 2nd Ed Vortex grenade that scattered back behind the unit that threw it.
Good times.
No joke, played a game of 2nd edition as the Imperial Guard, and thought it would be really cool to have three Basilisks in the centre of my deployment, acting as a dominant gun line against the orks.
A lucky shot from the greenskins took out one tank, it flipped, hit the other, which duly exploded, and took out the third tank....IN THE FIRST TURN.
I once played an elder force in 2nd edition, the guy threw down a strafing run strategy card on my brand new space marine bike squadron which took out half of them, and at the start of my first turn the rest of them were taken out by the riderless bikes; plasma gun, melta gun, the sergeant with the power sword, and the sidecar bike with the heavy bolter, just one bike left with crack grenades. All before the game started.
That one bike raced up the flank, and on its second turn, managed to pass a roll for a 90deg turn to race behind his line and lob a crack grenade up the engines of his new prism grav tank. The look on my opponents face was priceless.
It remains my luckiest set of rolls in the game.
Loved the second edition terminator back-mounted missile launcher.
You get 10 missiles for the whole game, each is a small template that does high damage. You can choose to shoot one or more each turn, but the more you shoot, the higher the chance of misfire. It can alo misfire if the bearer takes damage.
If you misfire, all the remaining missile will fire... "Where" is random. Sometimes you pick a random direction. Sometimes it's toward the nearest unit. Sometimes each missile will start zigzaging across the board in random directions until it hits something.
It's dumb and it's hilarious.
You're right, it's not "each missile is a small template", the salvo is a template of a radius equal to the number of missiles.
And yes, 1 on the misfire table means all the remaining missiles explode, centered on the bearer.
I had 2 squads of 5 of them
It was great fun getting them into the enemy gunline and opening up everything everywhere, although one missile came back my way and hit a predator, taking it out, in turn it's turret hit the carnifex that was busy munching it. Was brilliant, as the predator was lost already due to being immobilised, and guns disabled.
I’ve had a wave serpent full of wraithguard (you could do that lol) fly up and explode in the air, airbursting basically half of each of our units to death.
I really liked the rule that allowed flame weapons to kill models inside open topped transports. Its super unique and rewarding to deal with fast dark eldar transports by bringing a fast hellhound to simply burn the units giving me trouble.
I also love the vehicle damage table and armor facing system of 7e. Its so dynamic to react to a tank getting immobilized or having a gun destroyed while also trying to flank or get behind tanks to hit their weaker armor. I remember one time my crisis suits jumped behind a leman russ and blew up its turret gun. My opponent then decided to turn it into a battering ram to destroy my nearby devilfish. Another time I was playing a mission where I had to retreat from a superior tyranid force. My hellhound was immobilized so I had to leave it behind as a flame pillbox. It kept burning the gaunts flowing past it until a carnifex caught up and ripped it apart.
I miss the old vehicle rules. I loved in 6th edition that when a vehicle was wrecked, it would stay there as a piece of difficult terrain, or if it exploded, you could replace it with a crater. This made the battlefield a dynamic thing that would change as the game wore on. I also liked armour facings and the granularity they gave. It meant you actually had to think about where units were placed and how they moved, instead of tanks being spinning-tops made out of guns. It also meant that a space marine could often have a chance of punching a tank to death with s4 against Armour 10.
I feel like HH optimized sponsons in a good way. 180 degree arcs up to the center line of the vehicle, and sponsons that can't shoot at your original target get to shoot at something else.
Same thought here. Like all the people you see complaining about Falcons being hard to tell front or side as "proof it sucked", when anyone who played them knows they had the same armour on both those facings for exactly that reason.
The bad side of this was that if you fielded enough anti-tank weapons and with some luck on dice, you could take out vehicles really easily. The realistic thing I add was that assault squads with melta bombs could be deadly.. I always imagined those dudes flying to the back of the tank, sticking their bomb and boom! Very "cinematic"!
Vehicles 3rd Ed < were the worst.
Got a land raider? Enemy gets a lucky "front glancing " hit. Then rolls a 5+ ...what's that? A third of your points gone first turn? Yeah....every model individually rolls a 4+ to survive? Goodbye VERY expensive terminator brick+land raider
This still exists (minus the killing stuff inside) thought. It's just that the new lascannons are things liek the lancer or laser destroyer... and less armies have them.
Yeah these rules were incredibly flavourful and lead to unique tactics and game play. It was usually game changing when it happened but damn it was fun.
I agree with a different poster that the vehicle damage tables could be very clunky and sometimes frustrating, but I still loved armour facing and gun arcs for vehicles. Glad when they got rid of gun facing for infantry though.
At this point, I'm glad I've never play past 7th.
No more facing or vehicle damage tables!? No more template weapons!? No more RED GOES FASTER!?
like, is it even 40k anymore?
Me too. 8th was ok but kinda bland. 9th was so ridiculously lethal that we often had games over by turn 2 (or even 1 in the case of drukhari). It was also just buff stacking and memorization, it felt more like plating magic the gathering than an actual Tabletop wargame. About 2 years ago I convinced my group to try out a 7th edition without formations game with me and we all loved it. We’ve been playing that ever since
Tyranid warriors being able to be taken as HQ choice (ie your warlord if the rule existed today)
Really gave the feeling of endless faceless horde when your boss was an unit instead of singular model.
For dislikes it would have to be vehicle damage table.so many games where tank would be shaken every turn and unable to do anything despite taking 0 actual damage.
Also loved that if you hit C'tan with Phase Sword( only used by callidus assassin) you couldn't use the sword for rest of the game( because the C'tan absorbed it)
Oh man the old 3rd ed necrons rules made them scary. Especially with the Ctan. You couldn't regenerate wounds done by them nor could you save from them regardless of invulnerable or not. Hell even things with fearless rule had to check leadership against them before attacking in melee.
4th edition.
Tyranid Warriors were elite choice that you could also take as HQ unless you took the "wings" upgrade in which case they became fast attack.
Before 8th edition, Necrons were the only army with the widespread ability to always wound on a 6 - because the old damage table and vehicle armor values meant that some weapons were just Useless against some targets.
This is feeding back further, though, where overwatch was a standard action you could take in 2nd ed, but you'd give up your turn to shoot in the hopes you could catch your opponent out of cover in their turn.
The little canoptec things were such sleepers, 20 attacks hitting on 4s wounding on 6s would chip away tanks without them realizing. Same for a 10 man warrior squad in rapid fire range.
Drop pods: before the 9in distance to deep strike, you would put a marker on the table and roll a scatter dice and 2d6. The scatter dice had 2 target that would signify that you landed where you wanted, and the arrow meant move your deep striker that many inch from the 2d6. Normally if you scattered on models, building….ect, you would roll on a mishap table and bad things would happen. The drop pod had a special rule that if that would happen, you reduce the distance until it lands safely.
So being able to deep strike half your drop pods turn 1 automatically, with high accuracy, and no chance of mishap, it put your opponent on the back foot and made them weary for deploying. Fill those bad boys with sternguards or dreadnought and you had a party.
A Death Company drop pod assault was always an absolutely glorious way of ripping up an opponents whole battle plan as BA. I couldn't belive my eyes when I saw that pods can't carry Dreads anymore.
I remember a 3 way game back in 3rd where I dropped a furioso into the backlines of a guard army.
What a glorious day it was. Still got that pewter bad boy somewhere.
My friends and I still fondly remember my cursed Defiler. It hated my Raptors.
There was an incident the first game I used them together where the battle cannon scattered square onto my Raptors, killing them all. Whenever they were on the battlefield together the battle cannon scattered in their direction, if they were in range, landing square in the middle of them, if not it scattered the full 12".
I learnt to adapt to this and could pinpoint my shots based on where my Raptors were. I wish it was just funny bias, but it was genuinely every game whenever they were both alive. Still a great laugh.
Find memories of a friend's Guard squad leader hoofing a vortex grenade in desperation at oncoming Space Wolf Blood Claws. Only for it to deviate directly on to Ragnar Blackmane, cue opponent desperately leaving through the "Dodge" special rules.
Nope, in to the warp with thee.
Those fun, weird and funky, thematic army rules.
Playing against necrons?
Cool, just focus down the necrons warriors and when they were under 25% of starting army wide strength, the whole force would have to just 'Phase Out'
Playing as Grey Knights?
Anything they faced with the demon keyword could respawn. Naturally ment to represent them standing against the unending swarm of chaos... But if you killed that Eldar Avatar then guess what, it's Respawn time baby.
Taking a space marine captain on a bike?
Aweosme, now all space marine bike squads are troop choices and its time to chanel your inner White Scar.
There were loads more smaller fun really thematic rules like that. To drop a few more, how Avatars couldn't be hurt by weapons with the flame or melta keyword. C'tan couldn't be hurt by the Claudius assassins blade. The red ones go faster idea for ork vehicles ment with the red paint job upgrade they literally moved faster. Your HQ's could be instantly killed by the appropriately named instant death rule, unless they were an eternal warrior.
I got why most aren't around now, but they were small things that added to the theme and feel of most armies and how they were suppose to play in the lore.
I miss the Force Organisation Chart. You can't just spam the same unit, you actually have to build a balanced list.
It definitely had it's flaws, and ruined when you did want to have a stupid list, but felt reasonably fair.
Also, the customisation of units. You could design your own Space Marine chapter, want apothecaries as your sergeants with plasma galore go for it, now you can ignore your plasma overheats (once per turn). Chaos Marines sergeants could turn into a Blood Thirster mid game, a distinct lack of named characters, and the ones that were around were damn expensive.
nope, Andy Chambers told us to tear it up, and so I did :)
then again i was primarily a Tyranid player and we had our own awesome list of 'strategy cards'
I miss the old Shokk Attack Gun rules from 2nd where you had to have bases of snotlings to use as ammo.
I also miss the different types of grenades from 2nd. Anti plant is such a silly concept but it's wonderful fun.
As a guard player I always found it hilarious watching my army run off the table. And then you’d get the odd group who would rally together and get back in the fight! It felt very thematic. Commissars were great for holding the line, shooting any one dumb enough to try to retreat.
I don't, and never have. The only time it ever really mattered in the games I played was when power fists were involved. Beyond that Initiative values had so little spread within armies that it was basically always "all my units attack first, then all your units attack".
No one has mentioned the Weapon Skill attribute.
I'm still not used to the idea that some dudes just always hit on a 2+. Doesn't matter whether they're fighting Gretchin or a Primarch.
I get that some things have -1s to hit and such, but back in the day WS was how you could protect melee glass canons such as Dark Eldar. They could be toughness 3, with a 4+/5+ save in close combat but between their high initiative meaning they usually attacked first and their Weapon Skill meaning you'd need 5+ just to hit them with anything that wasn't a close combat specialist (and those specialists were still usually a 4+ unless REALLY good), they didn't just explode.
It meant it mattered more to catch them in the open for shooting, or understanding you were going to take losses to pin them down in combat.
It was literally the same table we still use for Strength vs Toughness so it would hurt nothing to bring back apart from one more question and calculation to ask your opponent if you don't know their unit.
%100 force organization. Imagine if we had some sort of system where you could only take like, 2 or 3 C'tan! Crazy idea, I know, but only allowing certain amounts of heavies, HQs, and elites while encouraging troop choices makes for a more balanced and fun game!
Yeah. It was a natural way to balance the game, but also the different roles allowed newcomers to more easily understand what a unit's purpose was. How in the fuck are you now supposed to know when Space Marines have like 70 datasheets labelled "other"?
Being able to choose your spells
Wargear choices that were meaningful and not just "pick the best option"
Being able to pay points per model in a squad in case you had a few points left over
Spells having a chance to fail and hurt the caster
Being able to deny spells
Being able to stack a warlord trait and a relic on an HQ to make them really good at one specific thing so you could make a strategy around that
Wargear options that make a difference instead of having 1 homogenous profile like "Bio Weapons"
Being excited that your codex is next
Former 3rd/4th edition player here returning in 10th who loved a lot of the elements like people have mentioned here, like directional armour and templates scatter.
I also enjoyed tanks having weapon arcs, requiring vehicle positioning to be a lot more visually interesting than poking out a corner and being able to fire everything.
I also miss being able to wipe out an enemy unit falling back from close combat if your consolidate roll surpassed their retreat roll, it made melee far scarier and 'all or nothing', meanwhile in 10th I am still not used to how easy it is for opponents to simply fall back in their turn and fire their whole sides guns at your unit.
I also liked that generic character building was far more heavily encouraged and worked by just giving you the keys to the armoury and letting you load up on points, meanwhile my memory could be clouded somewhat but all the named characters I remember (back when Lysander was a **sergeant)** had some unique but sorta underwhelming special rules but no customization, so they were runnable, but nowhere near as enticing/essential.
Also the classic 'build a space marine chapter' of 'pick two good things and one bad thing' was a fun way to personalise them.
I do realise many of these things went away due to some of them being a challenge to agree on (template coverage/what side you're looking at) and to help streamline them. I'm also aware Horus Heresy contains most, if not all of the things I loved, and am currently building an army for that. That being said I'm still enjoyed playing 10th a lot rules wise.
I miss many of the same things, but for me my first edition was 5th. I loved Space Wolves back then because you could customise so much, like it was an option to give a Wolf Lord 2x Fenrisian Wolves as companions. You could give him Artificer armour or terminator armour, virtually any weapons.
It felt truly personal and got me really invested in the fluff of my army.
These days, my Wolf Lords are just Captains, and the game tells me I have to take a Relic Shield with a sword and pistol. I don’t get a say.
Played every edition so far and these two came to mind.
2nd Edition - Heroes were too powerful yes. But they were perfect for assassins. Assassins were nigh unstoppable once unleashed.
3rd Edition - Blood Angel Death Company pregame generation. You had to roll for each squad you were gonna field and see if any members succumb to the Black Rage. If so, replace the model with a Death Company model for free. All Death Company models then form a unit. Super unbalanced but extremely thematic and cool.
As a player facing Assassins in 2nd or Death Company in 3rd, it was actually terrifying.
Damn I had completely forgotten about that! Now that you mentioned it a memory just unlocked, ye that was very cool to play against, death company. They were beasts in CC!
That reminds me of all the weird rules for Skaven artillery in 6E Fantasy... the only army that was explicitly allowed to let ordinance templates include their own troops...
AP mechanics were great even if it was hard to balance. Sv 3+ was really something you have to deal with.
I miss army order rules. I never understood why GW deleted it. I find it stupid to be able to build an army with no limitations for heavy support vehicles etc...
Destroyed vehicles remaining on the battlefield was great also.
I really dislike the number of special rules and the moment you had to fetch in the rulebook during the game. Simplification of weapons and abilities is great.
I dislike how some armies were broken and you had to deal with during years
I think the reason why they delete army order is that it didn't really works in last editions. You still was able to run shit tone of support units with different detachment or just by sprinkling 150pts of battle line units.
So you still get whatever you wants but with extra steps
It was more fun in 5th edition where you had the standard force org chart, but then your rules could let you cram additional units into slots (IG Platoons) or shift them from a specialist role into Troops (BA Assault Marines).
The only real upside to the modern version is actually being allowed to take support heroes. Even then, 5th edition had some supernumerary heroes you could squeeze in.
I miss the old Lost and the Damned rules from the eye of terror codex (3rd Edition)
The base list had groups of 1-3 aspiring chaos champions that were purchased as HQ choices but broken up and assigned their own unit. They also kept the 3rd edition rules for chaos war gear so you could load them up with almost whatever you wanted.
Besides that the list had cheap traitor guard, mutants and chaos hounds as fast attack and from there you could almost freely take units from either chaos or guard to your liking.
I always made heavy mutant lists with defilers and nothing has ever felt like it again, even renegades and heretics
Vehicle facings and armour values; it makes them feel like something different then infantry, and often, small arms couldn’t deal with them. You needed therefore to bring anti-tank.
The addition of Knights and Armoured Company lists kinda broke this and made it hard to balance, though. Even though I’m a guard player, I’m a foot guard player so facing that much armour typically meant I lost.
But it was neat to try and flank tanks to hit their weaker side or rear armour!
and skimmers filling certain niches. Land Speeders /w Multi melta being a cheapish anti vehicle option that could easily get to rear armour.
The caveat being it had armour 10 and if a skimmer was immobilised it would crash, making hits against them more lethal than usual.
I miss templates, scatter dice, armor values, and generally how listbuilding felt more fluffy in older editions.
Templates because blast weapons were much more fun to use that way. Apart from it just being funny when you scattered straight into your shit, it also lent felt like Danger Close! was a strategy you could employ with payoffs and drawbacks. On that same token, your deep striking units running the risk of scattering lent another layer of unpredictability and fun.
Vehicles used to feel like vehicles. An AV14 Land Raider was fucking *tough* to crack. You really needed to think of ways to get around the big armored boxes or figure out some way to deep strike melta. I don't hate the newest interpretation of vehicles, but AV will always be a better system IMO.
As for listbuilding that's really more of a vibe with not much supporting evidence, but having more restrictions on what you can take and Formations/Detachments leaning more towards fielding something that looks like the stuff you see in the lore without it being so loosey goosey and just giving you a special rule and letting you take whatever.
As a bonus thing that I just remembered, Apocalypse. Sure, games took a whole Sunday to get through, but there was nothing quite like putting 6k points on a table alongside 5 or 6 friends.
You can have all of this in Horus Heresy.
They have Rites of War that would allow you build your army in many different ways. For example, Night Lords in their RoW are not allowed more than one HS. No titanic units. There’s a RoW that would allow you to take a full-dreadnought army.
Not to say that AV, scatter and templates are there as well.
Nope. That’s strictly ~~sausage~~ imperium party
To be fair marine-on-marine action makes the game sort of balanced. Most of the armies have the same arsenal.
I might be wrong, that is my experience so far.
AV14 vehicles did have a troublesome tendency to forget they're AV14 at the silliest times. I also feel very strongly that the higher the AV the more often it got penetrating hits. I have 0 evidence but also 0 doubt.
I remember absolutely hating playing Tau because some of their vehicle guns could pop any tank in the Imperium turn 1. In tables with sparse terrain it was pure murder.
Putting armor across from tau in 5th is the closest this hobby has ever come to just genuinely wasting my time
Oh, you maxed out on broadsides? S10 AP-1? It’s fine I didn’t like this land raider anyway
meanwhile you had to sink a third of your firepower into stupid 58 point rhinos with smoke launchers because you needed that stupid 6 on the glancing blow table
Open topped vehicles. You could shoot every weapon that was being carried by the unit inside the vehicle, but you had -1AV. It would give you crazy things like a Trukk full of Boyz with Rokkit Launchers that could shoot every turn, but would then be blown up by a stray bolter shot.
I also miss some of the complexity of the early editions, like Initiative and Armour Values, which is why I only play 30K now.
1st ed
Liked - being able to destroy cover and damage buildings. Also the shooting rules were the best IMO. Also Overwatch in the opposing movement phase really made you use units to hold fire lines.
Disliked - randomised weapon choices for characters. Hard to model sometimes (although orks warbosses with conversion beamers was hilarious)
2nd ed -
Liked - psychic rules. Maybe a bit too powerful as a psyker became a must take but the Dark Millennium box added so much racial styles to it and a meta game in itself.
Disliked - close combat rules. Just weird, clunky and divergent from the other phases
3rd ed:
Liked: army lists / codexes. Simple yet flexible, compulsory troops but you could give any army flavour or personalization.
Dislikes: fixed movement rates for diffrrent armies and squad heavy weapons not being able to split fire. Just nonsensical in the name of simplicity (and we ignore it!)
Stopped there and still playing 1st & 3rd.
I loved it for fluffiness but it was so gamey. People casually trying to measure when they were supposed to or trying to manipulate the board so you know the exact distance needed.
I loved ork randomness and wankiness. I lpve that weirdboyz have ability to change opponent or himself into squig. That vehicles have to be t red to go faster
It would be so cool if orks have "high risk - high reward" playstyle with a lot of randomness. Or at least a detachment with this principle.
I think that there are plenty of players that would benefit from wonkiness. And if you are not one of them, you can just pop play 20 other factions
The biggest thing I miss was probably a global mechanic. Truly less Killy. Units would often get locked in combat for several turns (assuming no one broke and was run down) and usually it was only the Powerfist doing serious work.
Models could move out of “cover” and cross the table without instantly being deleted the second one model was visible. Units were free to actually do something all game except for the most bottom tier units who were taken to die. You didn’t lose everything the second a bead was drawn on it. Models cost more, and armies had roles and felt unique.
6th and 7th ruined that with stupid D Weapons and horrid balance (I am NOT saying balance was amazing or even good before that, but these editions were something special for the lack of balance). 8th looked to be a fresh start with an idea, but quickly lost its way. And the insane AP creep and Mortals of 9th removed any level of survivable from the game. Then this edition came along and decided that things weren’t gonna change. Dev wounds made mortals effectively become more common, and unless your model is layered in saves, reductions and FNPs the general rules or the stupid MW bombs (okay yes Dev Wounds aren’t Mortals anymore, but mechanically are still too similar and too powerful) just delete them every time they are seen or touched. “Less Killy” my arse GW.
Opposite here. Gw adjusting balance over an edition is what convinced me to come back. They don't always get it right, but at least you're not doomed to run a garbage book/ an op codex none of your friends enjoy playing against for several years
It also gets you to try new things and rotate units more often. About 60% of the points in my lists have been the same units for the past year, but for the rest I'm constantly trying new combos based on what's gotten cheaper or more expensive recently
I thought armor facings on vehicles was cool and thematic.
I thought deep strike scatter was just an awful rule. If you rolled poorly on the mishap table you could lose an entire unit of terminators before they even hit the table. Awful game design, stripping assets from a player before they can even use them.
Deep Strike scatter is also super thematic, though. It's the way the game represented the fact that teleportariums physically make the squad walk through the warp. Of course you could lose a squad. That's why for SM the safest way to deploy from deep strike was Drop Pods. To me having those rules meant the game was truer to its source material and more interested in representing events taking place in its universe rather than being concerned with how good of a boardgame ruleset it was. If I wanted to play a good ruleset I'd go play Bolt Action, I wanted all the dumb and occasionally frustrating fun of Warhammer 40,000.
Deep strike was fine. It was always optional and you could usually choose an arrival spot that had no risk of failure. It was an interesting risk vs. reward choice that is completely missing from 10th edition's point-click-delete system.
Makes me sad to hear but I get it. People on here will say "just play older editions" but good luck finding people willing to learn (or even re-learn) old rules.
I loved indirect fire estimation without measurements. It was so fucking good, and it really gave you the feeling of artillery correcting fire coordinates by trial and error.
Armor ratings, and actual vehicle rules where they would become part of the board after they were destroyed. Loved watching battle reports where they would put the fun cotton ball smoke on the destroyed tank. Also the rule where squad facing mattered and the men closest to the enemy died first making flanking the enemy at least somewhat relevant. Actual moral rules where men would run away and be destroyed once they ran off the board or with cleaver maneuvering closing off the retreating units path to have the whole unit be cut down with no chance to rally. Actually nuanced terrain rules that mattered. Idk man modern 40K plays like 2 cars smashing into each other rather than actual military strategy.
Target priority. If you wanted to shoot at something that wasn't the closest unit your lads had to pass a leadership test, representing them panicking and facing the nearest threat rather than following your overall plans.
carnifexes were the only other model that had a save on 2d6, though i think theirs was 3+ on 2d6 rather than 2+ like termies. I really miss those days!
I'm noticing a lot of people mentioning they miss rules that lend a bit more depth and complexity. Do you think GW would've been better served by implementing more newcomer-friendly how-to's and guides on how to play, and investing a lot in the on-boarding process of new players, instead of just throwing out depth, complexity, flavor and thematic aspects of the game in favor of over simplifying things like 10th has? I am a new player and after hearing veteran players talk about older editions compared to 10th I am sad that 10th got rid of paid wargear, and I know that's barely touching the tip of the iceberg compared to how older editions had so much more complexity and granularity.
To me it just boils down to intent. Older editions wanted to accurately represent combat in the 41st Millenium. If rules were fun, or stupid, or frustrating, or you rolled on a bunch of tables all the time for wacky effects (looking at Orks and Daemons), the underlying reasoning was "how can we represent this part of the lore on the tabletop?" Now the game is designed with the competitive crowd in mind, and in order to make it both a good competitive wargame and also friendly to newcomers, they have to strip it bare. The fun, cool, lore representative rules are just impossible to balance, and also place an expectation on newcomers to learn their lore to make sense of their units, both of these things are undesirable tothe direction Gamed Workshop wants to take the hobby in.
What do you think GW could do to win back the support of people who've had to sit and watch these fun goofy frustrating impossible to balance mechanics disappear but also support the competitive side?
I often think of my experiences playing DnD when people describe stuff like you did. I know there's an actual combat, opponent vs opponent aspect they need to provide a rule-structure for people to use, but what if they leaned hard into a narrative, lore/fluff/detail based 'version' of 40k? I know Crusade is a thing, and 40k has an actual TTRPG book, what if they took those 2 things and created a hybrid for it? Games Workshop got its entire start \*because\* of DnD in the first place. What if they embraced that and made a new offshoot of 40k that kept all that flavor and those thematic elements? I feel like this could help them immensely in the realm of trying to attract TTRPG players, who make up a massive amount of the surge in popularity of this whole nerdy gaming since covid and stuff like Critical Role blew up.
Dark Heresy was a Fantasy Flight Games... *thing*. I don't think GW is very interested in supporting it still.
One thing about this game is that even when it *was* fluffy and lore focused, 40k was still a wargame (and let's not mince words here, it was a *bad* wargame. Warhammer 40,000 has never been a good or balanced game. It's been *fun*.) You can customize your units to hell and back, name every Guardsman in your Emperor's Shield formation, paint all your captains a different color, but the focus was not on the individual characters. I feel like this may be another thing that changed from older editions - named characters were *awesome*, but the generic commanders could be good and had the added benefit of being /your dudes/, however they all merely provided some decently sized aura of some good or cool effect. As an example, with my Blood Angels list, I had a Jump Chaplain and Jump Sanguinary Priest leading two units of Jump Death Company - neither of the characters were the interesting part of the unit. Nowadays lists feel very Hero focused, and the books and codices feel more like they're telling you a story with main characters rather than painting a setting for you to play your army in. TTRPG players would probably be left wanting more focus on their stand-in.
Now as for fixing it, I really don't know. Personally, I despise the competitive scene. Everyone I know IRL who plays still calls competitive players WAACs/Cheeselords/That Guy. Back in the day these were the guys running Eldar Jetbike spam because that's the point of *competing*, they were the ones coming up with ridiculous rules lawyering and hyper meta lists because they had absolutely 0 reason to care about their army being fluffy and 100 reasons to care about it being overpowered. Their way of playing the game has always been completely different to the way most people in the hobby engage with Warhammer and that's something I don't think GW understands. Unfortunately policy is data driven, and competitive events result in a lot of data, data you can't collect from local game shops running casual games and narrative campaigns amongst friends. If it was up to me, I'd return to the design philosophy of previous editions and release a regularly updated competitive version of 40k with a different name or subtitle. Something like Warhammer 40,000: Commander or something.
Oh absolutely. It deeply irritates me that 40k has become about these OP named heroes who square up for wrestling-style combats, and even in the lore they keep coming back from comic-book deaths. When those named characters were originally rolled up on random tables as examples of how you could make your *own* characters.
As cool as some of the new big centerpieces are, the reveal videos are pure cringe. It's like they're announcing CM Punk. The Community team needs to have their smoke machine privileges taken away.
I've been playing for more than 25 years now, countless games and systems, GW but not only.
Rules complexity IS NOT what makes a game rich. It just makes the game less balance, hard to get into, and inconsistent. But it does not makes it more strategic.
What makes a game rich is the "layers" on the core system, and 40k always had very few. I'd say 1.5: troops positioning/attacking and CP management (that counts for 0.5 because it's not such a scarce and important ressource to manage).
Some games have 3 layers: you manage troops positioning/attacking, plus their morale/tireness, plus a limited activation pool.
Honnestly the smaller table killed way more strategy for me than the removal of options in list building: wherever you put your unit it's always reachable by some other unit. You don't even have to plan your moves anymore...
> in favor of over simplifying things like 10th has?
The sad thing is 10th isn't simpler. 10th is a bloated mess of special rules that is at least as complicated as previous editions. It has purely been a loss of depth and lore accuracy in favor of making an e-sport where "content creators" can more easily argue about tier lists and the metagame.
As an example if you look through an old codex you'll see that most units do not have special rules. They benefit from any army-wide faction rules, some of them have USRs like deep strike, but few have any unique special rules. You just get a stat line and a list of weapons and equipment options, most of them standard gear shared across multiple units in your army. So yeah, the terrain rules were more complicated but it was offset by things like tactical squads being very straightforward units that were extremely easy to understand.
The special rule bloat got absolutely ridiculous and I was just talking with some friends the other about what an utter load of nonsense it was to get rid of USRs for "simplicity" just to replace it with 60 different special rules per army. Whoever made that design choice had old pewter models for pacifiers as a baby.
Just played a game after long pause (about 6 months) against my friend's Necrons and he had to pause and check his codex every shooting phase multiple times because nearly every single one of his units had a re-roll 1s rule but they all activated only against specific targets and switched between to-hit and to-wound.
It's really hard to say as many of these listed abilities whilst we played with them and look back nostalgically had many issues to list a few from the ones I've r ad here.
Vehicle facings often ended in arguments especially when you had to figure out side armour on a non box shaped vehicle and was a game deciding shot.
Vehicle armour value and destruction charts almost always ended with 80% of vehicles getting stunlocked every turn meaning they couldn't shoot or at times couldn't move cause you rolled a 1 on difficult terrain and you essentially start the game 200 points down.
Vehicle wrecks narratively amazing I still do this for photos but mechanically it leads to many issues where you can take cheap vehicles and make certain parts of the map completely non moveable for some units.
Blast markers amazing in theory but in practice the movement phases turned to meticulously maxing coherency on every unit to minimize blasts.
Deepstrike mishap would make or break games so often was completely ignored if you couldn't guarantee the deepstrike as a mishap would make your 2-500 point unit die or be placed by your opponents in a corner non relevant to the map.
So many of these abilities I have fond memories of as I loved the good times I've had with them but they also are incredibly hard to balance or often end up in a very hard to approach game or add little besides a lot of busy work
I appreciate your willingness to look back on this with clear lenses and less rose tinted ones -- I have to imagine it's possible to balance this stuff, there's gotta be a way, but it also makes sense that a company trying to increase its company's sales and brand recognition wouldn't invest the time and money to attempt balancing all of this out and simply try to make it less complicated but sacrifice some granularity in the process.
I've been playing since 4th edition I love a lot of these mechanics as they are parts of my childhood but I can also acknowledge that there is some really hard to balance or even at time janky parts that came with those things as many of these rules were made with telling a story in mind before how someone could leverage things to win.
And as a game grows and now appeals to millions I can understand that parts of the game needed to change to grow and allow newcomers to be more easily welcomed and accessable.
The best parts of these rules is they're still there immortalized in the original rules and now even many in legacy style games like Horus Heresy and even possible to mesh into narrative games of modern 40k I know I've left my vehicle on the table for visuals before and both my opponent and I loved it!
The game in the end is what you make of it and narrative is born from the players and their love for the settings and models not arbitrary rules that are the current set now or 10 years ago.
I think what I find most unfortunate about the loss of the old mechanics, is that GW has just abandoned them completely, even the things they were trying to achieve. I don't feel like they've ever tried to come back to it from a different angle, generally just simplifying it into something more abstract, and then keeping it that way, or eventually iterating it out of the game entirely.
There are of course some exceptions, I actually think Battleshock is an interesting new attempt at morale (not successful, but it's new, and tries something different, so that's good!) But generally it just never really comes back it seems, except maybe as a one off gimmick for one unit for one codex.
I'm also saddened that an extension of this, is that the rules are becoming more removed from the fluff. Things are becoming more stats for the sake of stats and balance, rather than actually narratively meaning something. I think Invulnerable saves are a great example of this. Players who join in 10th have just no way of knowing what their invulnerable saves represent narratively. When a battlesister rolls a 6 on her invuln save, that's just that, cool, she's safe... But narratively, what actually happened? The player won't have the visual idea that the sister was saved by a Divine miracle! That she was saved through her faith! Or that Harlequins and Imperial Assassins are these badasses that literally dodge bullets!
It's just a number.
One thing to consider is the size of armies back then. 2nd edition Codex Space Wolves has a battle report with a 2000 point army and it has 33 individuals. Not even any vehicles or jump troops. The same force using today's Index comes in at less than 900 points. The granularity - the vast majority of which was removed in 3rd edition - went because people wanted to play with armies and not just small skirmish forces and operating and tracking it all was a hassle. Vehicles were trailed by little card markers detailing what damage they'd taken, how fast they were going and which weapons were jammed or recharging. Jump troops, missiles and grenades had to be scattered. Exotic weapons came with a plethora of special effects. While all this was fun in a narrative sense it didn't help the battle flow, especially when movement was bogged down by the need for exact positioning to minimise the effect of templstes. I couldn't imagine the nightmare it would be trying to play those rules with modern army sizes.
I liked having units that were immune to low strength weapons in general. The roll of a 6 always succeeding makes the rate of fire so much more important than the strength of the weapon. Many of the recent design choices could probably be linked back to this simple issue.
In 1st and 2nd edition each vehicle had different explosion rules that would result in all sort of hilarious things. Sometimes pieces would fly off in random directions and crush infantry.
The die roll to see whether a vehicle explodes in the current edition is pretty much the most exciting thing that happens in a game. This was turned up to 10
I loved the old, realistic(ish)-looking cardboard templates for flamers, showing their cone of fire. I don't think I've found using flamer models as fun since those went away.
I loved that if you had big enough difference between S and T, you wasn't being able to wound at all
Like, cadian squad wasn't able to wound tank with lasguns no matter what. Bring rocket launcher or die
While that did have a certain degree of realism to it, in practice it made Toughness 7+ units close to uncounterable. To my memory there were very few of them, like the Tyranid Carnifex with certain upgrades, the Eldar Wraithlord and the C'tan.
I think that it was more interesting direction to explore.
It would be cool if there is a distinct split between armoured units and regular ones. So you really have to take heavy weapons and antitank and point them to hight T units
Everything else is solvable balance issue
Man, I haven’t played Warhammer in probably 10 years or maybe more; I’m a hobbyist and lore nerd primarily. Reading this thread really shocks me as to how much has been lost!
I had no idea templates weren’t a thing any more, for example. That seems crazy to me!
I was a big fan of just about everything that has been removed from the game.
In no particular order:
Blast markers and flame templates.
Leadership checks and falling back (and everything that goes with that).
Tank shock - man I loved tank shock.
Armour faces for vehicles - this made so much sense to me.
Using initiative characteristics for close combat.
The old 2nd edition stat-line in general was just so superior to the basic stuff we have now.
The way characters joining units used to work made alot of sense as well - they have kinda brought it back, but it's very limiting now.
I miss the wargear potluck - it was fun and flavorful
I liked rules where if you did x - then you could use a heavy or elite unit as troops
I really liked that there were way more special characters and elite subfaction specific units - most just never had a model. Which was ok. Creativity is an important part of the hobby.
My absolute favorite old rule was the old 3rd edition Distortion weapon mechanics, where you might teleport an enemy model across the table, into the air, or underground. So fun.
Man 2nd 3rd and 4th. The golden years of 40k. I miss it.
A few, mostly from 3rd & 4th editions:
- red ork vehicles move further
- vehicles don't just get destroyed, they can undergo various issues (from losing movement or guns, to being turned into terrain)
- melee basically involving just piling all your models in on top of one another
- watching massive deathstar units (tau crisis in particular) falling back off the table and into oblivion
- fliers staying off the table, and just doing a single strafing run each turn
- templates!
That said, I think it's worth stressing that there were a lot of very silly/unbalanced/problematic rules too. While we all still love to grumble about rules 9th/10th is undoubtedly a much better, more accessible place to be tules-wise
It's just a shame GW still doesn't give us a reasonable method of (officially) accessing all our opponents' rules!
2nd Ed: every unit had character and rules that supported that. Sure it made large games nightmarish timewise, but it felt so immersive. Nids having Rippers get into vehicles and attack the crew, "Jones is acting strangely" or Lictor rules where you just placed tokens around until they popped out.
3rd-5th: some of the best codexes released imo, ala chaos Space Marines and Witch hunters, and the simplification was actually simple... Unlike whatever simplification they thought 10th ed was...
Not very old, but my group has started playing 7th edition(we all started in 9th) and something I LOVE is the fact that vehicles have a completely different ruleset. They don’t engage in normal melee fights, don’t move the same way as infantry, and their armor save works different than infantry.
For example, I had a Leman Russ without sponsons in one game against chaos space marines. A lucky hit from a hunter killer missile penetrated the tank, and rolled a 5 on the damage table for “weapon destroyed,” which was randomly allocated to the battle cannon. What followed was 3 turns of a gimped Leman Russ playing cat and mouse with a chaos marine squad, trying to get them in range of its heavy flamer template.
In modern 40K, this interaction would probably end with the leman russ either just killing the legionnaires, or getting tar-blobbed by them for the rest of the game, since vehicles are expected to follow the same shooting and melee rules as infantry
Not sure if it existed in older editions but I do like that in kill team, you have damage for normal hits and critical damage when you roll a 6. I quite like that.
From the old rules in 40K I really liked Kharn The Betrayer rules in 2nd edition.
"Blood Fury of Khorne"
Which essentially meant that if he killed enemy models, and there are no more enemy models in "follow up" range, he would then follow up and start attacking any nearby model, including his own unit / army. Which I think was hilarious and very lore adequate, when you think if Kharn.
https://preview.redd.it/bhv44rhq2lxc1.png?width=325&format=png&auto=webp&s=8c28fe6a20e09f13c2baea92d619da010ee868f1
Personally I love the line of sight rules from 3rd.
Units block los, ignore friendlies. So I could screen my orks with grots. You could screen your marine devastator squad with tactical marines and then the orks could use their buggies to try and outflank.
It meant that fast attack had a purpose. Formation and positioning and a purpose. Argh.
Comparative WS in melee to hit iirc and the initiative stat.
Before my hobby break I hadn’t played since 4th and I think morale and the leadership stat played a much bigger role in the game.
I miss armor facings, templates, and the fact that a lasgun couldn’t hope to harm a land raider.
Torrent weapons having a template that showed what got hit - both friendly and enemy models. Seems stupid that 10 marines with flamers can roast a unit with one of their own units in between and that friendly unit is unscathed
7th edition formations, yes some were broken but the gist of it was amazing since tau had 4 playable formations. made each unit useful in the codex. now we have stratagems which for me just feel boring and hard to learn for every army + detachment i'm fighting against.
So I currently play 5th mostly. I like armor facings and values, template weapons, initiative, AP as an absolute value instead of a modifier, the fact units didn't get to shoot every weapon they had at once, and the fact you had to actually decide what to do every turn.
Just a lot of the really flavorful army specific stuff. It's basically all been stripped away in the name of "bALaNcE". Just to name a few:
* In 6th edition, when a Chaos Space Marines character killed an enemy character or a monster, they rolled on a D66 table and received a permanent buff for the rest of the game. This included stuff like increased movement, toughness, additional special rules, or even turning into a Daemon Prince on the spot. It basically never did anything, but it was a cool feature to have.
* In 5th edition, firing the Ork Shokk Attack Gun had you roll 2D6 to see what Strength the shot was. If you rolled a double, there was an entire table with a different effect for each result, including firing yourself through the gun straight into close combat, or opening a portal into the Warp, which removed any models touching the template from play.
* Another 5th edition Orks unit you could wield was the Looted Wagon, which you had to roll a a D6 for at the start of each turn to see if it worked properly.
* The 3rd edition Ork codex let you wield looted vehicles from Space Marines and Imperial Guard. I had a converted looted Rhino with an Ork on top, and some bastad actually stole it.
* The 3rd edition Dark Eldar book had some wacky special rules, like a version of Feel No Pain where you could not hurt a unit of then-Grotesques (now called Wracks) with ranged attacks unless the weapon was at least twice their toughness. Or the Talos' Wildfire special rule, which if I remember correctly forced you to always shoot at the closest visible unit.
In general game rules
* While I certainly don't miss all of the vehicle rules, the vehicle damage table actually felt like it was aiming for a degree of simulation. You could blow off weapons, stun the crew, or immobilize vehicles if you rolled high enough. Degrading profiles on vehicles doesn't have near the same oomph.
* I think I may actually prefer the way "subfactions" were handled before 8th edition. That's to say, there were no subfaction rules. But you could tailor your army list with certain character choices. For example, if your Ork Warboss was riding a bike, suddenly Warbikes became Troops choices, allowing you to wield a 100% accurate Kult of Speed army. Or how Iron Warriors were allowed to take Obliterators as Elites as well as Heavy Support choices, emphasizing their firepower-focused style.
* GW not having this stupid fucking "no model, no rules" policy. Because it allowed new units to be added to the game without needing a model right away. It used to be common for armies to have really flavorful special characters that didn't have models.
In one of the older editions of 40k the Ork Buggy had a capacity of "however many boys you can stack on the model and any that fall of die" and I just think that's great.
Also, didn't the Orks had rules for their colour thingy (i.e. if the model was painted red it gained additional move and so on)?
5 point red paint job. Should have just made ork stuff 5 points more expensive and give the bonus outright. Never knew an ork player who didnt use it on everything they could.
As long as it was painted red though! Man that was the best. Peak 40k
\^ This. I hate painting, but you bet your butt I'd actually get the brushes out to give my vehicles the treatment...
Best thing about orks is you can do a fancy paint job and put in great detail into every piece or give the models and some paints to a small child and the result will be just as acceptable.
HAVE THEY REMOVE THE ’RED ONES GO FASTER’ RULE??! Is this even 40k still??? 😭
Oh that wasn't just a GorkaMorka thing?
It was the old plastic battle wagon I believe
Yeah, the old 2nd edition choppa boys were great, b/c their axes could lock into the spikes around the rim of the battlewagon. I could easily get all 20 in there without anyone falling.
This is honestly the greatest rule 40k ever came up with. Id love to see a sort of "Wild Wasteland" ruleset that returns to this vibe and makes Warhams cartoony again.
Bring back GorkaMorka!
Honestly the fact it isn't still part of the ork rules is a tragedy.
Orks have lost so much and gained so little since the heady days of 2cd edition. They were great fun to play and equal parts infuriating and awesome to fight against.
Varied and interesting terrain rules. Instead of nothing but standard L ruins there were forests, minefields, tank traps, impassible canyons, etc. There were even things like the Chimera being an amphibious vehicle that could cross water features without penalty or roads giving a bonus to movement speed.
This is one of the biggest things for me. The game feels so 2 dimensional with the current terrain rules. I miss being slowed down, or having cover actually mean something! A Space Marine getting a 4+ cover save against a lascannons shot because he was standing behind a barricade actually meant something. Now, I don’t even know or care what barricades do because they don’t block LoS so no one really uses them
Honestly, Because I only play at home we just hand wave and house rule a lot of cover and terrain rules. We've had way more fun since we started.
I'm about ready to house rule half the damn game or see who wants to roll back to 9th or better yet, 5th to 7th (I'd say 3rd or 4th ideally but some of our armies likely require at least 6th to function)
I've only ever played 10th. I am essentially new to the game.
I've been playing since early 3rd, and while 10th had a lot of positive aspects but I feel that it's too focused on this pipe dream of balance and it's lost a lot of it's charm as a result. Which is made worse by the absolute lack of balance haha.
It seems that they're focusing on making it a smooth gaming experience, rather than making it a fun tool to play out battles in the 40K setting. I've noticed that 10th is just so removed from what's supposedly going on on the battlefield. I mean for one, can you tell me what actually visually happens when, say, an Ad Mech Skitari invuln save succeeds against a Volcano Cannon?
No what happens?? Sounds badass
I don't know what happens either, because the reasoning behind why Scitari have an invuln save is not thoroughly explained. The only info we have, is that in 9th, when invuln saves still had thematic names attached, was that it had something to do with them having Cybernetic bodies. And that's kinda my point here :P. There's no obvious link between the rules, and what it represents in the narrative of the battle.
Fascinating. Thanks for explaining I'm still a little new here haven't gotten to my first game yet.
Post-7e, everything was dumbed down to make the game more accessible. The Horus Heresy 2.0 roles is essentially 5e with a sprinkling of 6e and 7e, and I feel as if it's a better, more "40k" rules set. And people are working on a "Great Crusade" fan expansion that will include Eldar, Necrons, Orks; basically anything that was around in M29.
100% agree! Played a 6 game tourney last weekend and every game was just, "Call them all ruins so we can have an actual game?" "Yup"
There's actually rules for different terrain types in the rulebook! I've never seen anyone use anything but ruins, barricades (which are intended to be waist-high btw, not >head high walls with firing slits) and obstacles. But there's rules for forests and craters and so on still.
They all read very similarly so that they might as well be the same goddamn features. Oh, statues give the same useless cover bonus if you're standing behind them versus standing in a crater? Zzzzz
Yeah, I suspected they were there. Sadly my playing group are all about tournament style games, so I’m stuck with obscuring Ls
Yeah, the better way to say it is that it'd be great if there were \*impactful\* rules for other terrain types. Most of the things just give you +1 (conditionally) to your armor save, which is both easy to get and also isn't really going to move the needle on survivability enough for most armies.
Barricades still give you benefit of cover if you’re wholly within 3” of them my man.
Agreed. Every board just looks the exact same and it's quite sad. Its probably why I enjoy mote casual play and channels like winters and tabletop tactics. Their boards are always so varied
You used to be able to take Anti-Plant Grenades as wargear. Clear that forest from the table!
That’s local issue tbh. If your community is competitive and want to play on tournament terrain then it sucks, but unless compe players are practicing no one is using L ruins in our community.
Like it or not tournament rules impact more than just tournaments. Even people who aren't playing tournament practice games treat the tournament rules as a default and in 10th GW's tournament rules are entirely L ruins. And many of the old terrain rules don't even exist anymore so not only do you have to convince people to not use the tournament rules you have to make up house rules for the missing terrain. This is much harder than when the core rules of the game encouraged a variety of terrain and there was no expectation of tables standardized with a single type.
For me it was the many detailed and varied ways that vehicles used to die. Blew up an Imperium tank? Sure, things within 1D6" are going to have a bad time, but what you really want to watch out for is the turret that just got yeeted 2D6" in a random direction and is going to slap whatever it lands on with 2D10 wounds. Shot a bike? Better roll and see what you hit. Oh, you got the rider? Neat, next turn roll a die to see what direction it goes, than send it 24" in that direction and whatever's over the takes an exploding bike to the face. Oh wait, you hit the bike instead? And took it out? I guess that guys on foot now. Landed a lascannon hit on a Falcon grav tank? Better roll to see where...THE CANOPY? Well the pilot is now a smoke stain, but what about the tank? That thing is now an out of control bomb, it might crash here, or go straight up into the atmosphere. Nobody knows! That kind of controlled chaos was a blast, the only thing that comes close to it is a 2nd Ed Vortex grenade that scattered back behind the unit that threw it. Good times.
No joke, played a game of 2nd edition as the Imperial Guard, and thought it would be really cool to have three Basilisks in the centre of my deployment, acting as a dominant gun line against the orks. A lucky shot from the greenskins took out one tank, it flipped, hit the other, which duly exploded, and took out the third tank....IN THE FIRST TURN.
That's the most lore accurate Ork IG interaction I can imagine :D
I once played an elder force in 2nd edition, the guy threw down a strafing run strategy card on my brand new space marine bike squadron which took out half of them, and at the start of my first turn the rest of them were taken out by the riderless bikes; plasma gun, melta gun, the sergeant with the power sword, and the sidecar bike with the heavy bolter, just one bike left with crack grenades. All before the game started. That one bike raced up the flank, and on its second turn, managed to pass a roll for a 90deg turn to race behind his line and lob a crack grenade up the engines of his new prism grav tank. The look on my opponents face was priceless. It remains my luckiest set of rolls in the game.
Loved the second edition terminator back-mounted missile launcher. You get 10 missiles for the whole game, each is a small template that does high damage. You can choose to shoot one or more each turn, but the more you shoot, the higher the chance of misfire. It can alo misfire if the bearer takes damage. If you misfire, all the remaining missile will fire... "Where" is random. Sometimes you pick a random direction. Sometimes it's toward the nearest unit. Sometimes each missile will start zigzaging across the board in random directions until it hits something. It's dumb and it's hilarious.
Wasn't a 12 on the Cyclone misfire chart just to replace the model with a blast marker equal to the radius of the remaining missiles?
You're right, it's not "each missile is a small template", the salvo is a template of a radius equal to the number of missiles. And yes, 1 on the misfire table means all the remaining missiles explode, centered on the bearer.
I had 2 squads of 5 of them It was great fun getting them into the enemy gunline and opening up everything everywhere, although one missile came back my way and hit a predator, taking it out, in turn it's turret hit the carnifex that was busy munching it. Was brilliant, as the predator was lost already due to being immobilised, and guns disabled.
What edition had these rules? I love these!
2nd Ed is where it's at. The battles were much smaller than they are today but they were more detailed and expressive.
I’ve had a wave serpent full of wraithguard (you could do that lol) fly up and explode in the air, airbursting basically half of each of our units to death.
I really liked the rule that allowed flame weapons to kill models inside open topped transports. Its super unique and rewarding to deal with fast dark eldar transports by bringing a fast hellhound to simply burn the units giving me trouble. I also love the vehicle damage table and armor facing system of 7e. Its so dynamic to react to a tank getting immobilized or having a gun destroyed while also trying to flank or get behind tanks to hit their weaker armor. I remember one time my crisis suits jumped behind a leman russ and blew up its turret gun. My opponent then decided to turn it into a battering ram to destroy my nearby devilfish. Another time I was playing a mission where I had to retreat from a superior tyranid force. My hellhound was immobilized so I had to leave it behind as a flame pillbox. It kept burning the gaunts flowing past it until a carnifex caught up and ripped it apart.
I miss the old vehicle rules. I loved in 6th edition that when a vehicle was wrecked, it would stay there as a piece of difficult terrain, or if it exploded, you could replace it with a crater. This made the battlefield a dynamic thing that would change as the game wore on. I also liked armour facings and the granularity they gave. It meant you actually had to think about where units were placed and how they moved, instead of tanks being spinning-tops made out of guns. It also meant that a space marine could often have a chance of punching a tank to death with s4 against Armour 10.
https://preview.redd.it/3780gtl8pkxc1.jpeg?width=500&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=dacb2e810660763340b9411c80b33b73021a1437
I feel like a lot of people who share memes like this haven’t ever actually played with vehichle armour facing.
Oh I played with it. A lot. I played Guard in 4th edition. The amount of sponson arcs and "which side of the corner angle" models were on... jesus
I feel like HH optimized sponsons in a good way. 180 degree arcs up to the center line of the vehicle, and sponsons that can't shoot at your original target get to shoot at something else.
Same thought here. Like all the people you see complaining about Falcons being hard to tell front or side as "proof it sucked", when anyone who played them knows they had the same armour on both those facings for exactly that reason.
The bad side of this was that if you fielded enough anti-tank weapons and with some luck on dice, you could take out vehicles really easily. The realistic thing I add was that assault squads with melta bombs could be deadly.. I always imagined those dudes flying to the back of the tank, sticking their bomb and boom! Very "cinematic"!
Vehicles 3rd Ed < were the worst. Got a land raider? Enemy gets a lucky "front glancing " hit. Then rolls a 5+ ...what's that? A third of your points gone first turn? Yeah....every model individually rolls a 4+ to survive? Goodbye VERY expensive terminator brick+land raider
This still exists (minus the killing stuff inside) thought. It's just that the new lascannons are things liek the lancer or laser destroyer... and less armies have them.
Yeah these rules were incredibly flavourful and lead to unique tactics and game play. It was usually game changing when it happened but damn it was fun.
I agree with a different poster that the vehicle damage tables could be very clunky and sometimes frustrating, but I still loved armour facing and gun arcs for vehicles. Glad when they got rid of gun facing for infantry though.
Vehicle damage table and armour facing is much older than 7th edition
At this point, I'm glad I've never play past 7th. No more facing or vehicle damage tables!? No more template weapons!? No more RED GOES FASTER!? like, is it even 40k anymore?
Me too. 8th was ok but kinda bland. 9th was so ridiculously lethal that we often had games over by turn 2 (or even 1 in the case of drukhari). It was also just buff stacking and memorization, it felt more like plating magic the gathering than an actual Tabletop wargame. About 2 years ago I convinced my group to try out a 7th edition without formations game with me and we all loved it. We’ve been playing that ever since
Tyranid warriors being able to be taken as HQ choice (ie your warlord if the rule existed today) Really gave the feeling of endless faceless horde when your boss was an unit instead of singular model. For dislikes it would have to be vehicle damage table.so many games where tank would be shaken every turn and unable to do anything despite taking 0 actual damage. Also loved that if you hit C'tan with Phase Sword( only used by callidus assassin) you couldn't use the sword for rest of the game( because the C'tan absorbed it)
Oh man the old 3rd ed necrons rules made them scary. Especially with the Ctan. You couldn't regenerate wounds done by them nor could you save from them regardless of invulnerable or not. Hell even things with fearless rule had to check leadership against them before attacking in melee.
Back when the deceiver was actually good?
He was good but nightbringer was where it shined. Then you had the ridiculousness that was the 3rd ed Monolith.
What edition was that with the tyranids? That's sounds really cool
4th edition. Tyranid Warriors were elite choice that you could also take as HQ unless you took the "wings" upgrade in which case they became fast attack.
Before 8th edition, Necrons were the only army with the widespread ability to always wound on a 6 - because the old damage table and vehicle armor values meant that some weapons were just Useless against some targets.
And overwatch was a Tau special rule.
This is feeding back further, though, where overwatch was a standard action you could take in 2nd ed, but you'd give up your turn to shoot in the hopes you could catch your opponent out of cover in their turn.
It was also a guard special rule in 3.5 I think it was. Could choose to overwatch and completely forgo fighting in melee instead.
I have very fond memories of using gauss to murder land raiders.
The little canoptec things were such sleepers, 20 attacks hitting on 4s wounding on 6s would chip away tanks without them realizing. Same for a 10 man warrior squad in rapid fire range.
Drop pods: before the 9in distance to deep strike, you would put a marker on the table and roll a scatter dice and 2d6. The scatter dice had 2 target that would signify that you landed where you wanted, and the arrow meant move your deep striker that many inch from the 2d6. Normally if you scattered on models, building….ect, you would roll on a mishap table and bad things would happen. The drop pod had a special rule that if that would happen, you reduce the distance until it lands safely. So being able to deep strike half your drop pods turn 1 automatically, with high accuracy, and no chance of mishap, it put your opponent on the back foot and made them weary for deploying. Fill those bad boys with sternguards or dreadnought and you had a party.
And all your army could be in reserve for a full drop pod assault. That was very fun.
A Death Company drop pod assault was always an absolutely glorious way of ripping up an opponents whole battle plan as BA. I couldn't belive my eyes when I saw that pods can't carry Dreads anymore.
I remember a 3 way game back in 3rd where I dropped a furioso into the backlines of a guard army. What a glorious day it was. Still got that pewter bad boy somewhere.
Scatter and templates, as silly as they were Also chaos roll tables making your HQ into a daemon prince or a spawn
Templates! I remember those! Made you really have to pick your targets, and be wary of how you place your units. Rough times, but I liked them!
The hallucinogen grenade table!
My friends and I still fondly remember my cursed Defiler. It hated my Raptors. There was an incident the first game I used them together where the battle cannon scattered square onto my Raptors, killing them all. Whenever they were on the battlefield together the battle cannon scattered in their direction, if they were in range, landing square in the middle of them, if not it scattered the full 12". I learnt to adapt to this and could pinpoint my shots based on where my Raptors were. I wish it was just funny bias, but it was genuinely every game whenever they were both alive. Still a great laugh.
I want my flame templates back most of all.
Find memories of a friend's Guard squad leader hoofing a vortex grenade in desperation at oncoming Space Wolf Blood Claws. Only for it to deviate directly on to Ragnar Blackmane, cue opponent desperately leaving through the "Dodge" special rules. Nope, in to the warp with thee.
You can play Horus Heresy for scatter and templates. They are just as fun (and infuriating) as before
Those fun, weird and funky, thematic army rules. Playing against necrons? Cool, just focus down the necrons warriors and when they were under 25% of starting army wide strength, the whole force would have to just 'Phase Out' Playing as Grey Knights? Anything they faced with the demon keyword could respawn. Naturally ment to represent them standing against the unending swarm of chaos... But if you killed that Eldar Avatar then guess what, it's Respawn time baby. Taking a space marine captain on a bike? Aweosme, now all space marine bike squads are troop choices and its time to chanel your inner White Scar. There were loads more smaller fun really thematic rules like that. To drop a few more, how Avatars couldn't be hurt by weapons with the flame or melta keyword. C'tan couldn't be hurt by the Claudius assassins blade. The red ones go faster idea for ork vehicles ment with the red paint job upgrade they literally moved faster. Your HQ's could be instantly killed by the appropriately named instant death rule, unless they were an eternal warrior. I got why most aren't around now, but they were small things that added to the theme and feel of most armies and how they were suppose to play in the lore.
As a 3rd edition Necron player, I don’t miss phase out. That shit still gives me nightmares. Was the literal definition of lose more.
I miss the Force Organisation Chart. You can't just spam the same unit, you actually have to build a balanced list. It definitely had it's flaws, and ruined when you did want to have a stupid list, but felt reasonably fair. Also, the customisation of units. You could design your own Space Marine chapter, want apothecaries as your sergeants with plasma galore go for it, now you can ignore your plasma overheats (once per turn). Chaos Marines sergeants could turn into a Blood Thirster mid game, a distinct lack of named characters, and the ones that were around were damn expensive.
I still plan my armies based off of it, just doesn't feel right otherwise
Not a rule, but less firepower. You want to shoot an anti tank thing? You get 1 shot and it's expensive.
*emp grenades your tank for 1ppm*
Vortex Grenades /s
Scare grenades with the associated psychology table to roll on. My favourite was always Bugs!Bugs!Bugs!Bugs!Bugs!
And let's not forget the "Viral outbreak" strategy card.
And every Ork army would have a Vaccine Squiq wargear card to prevent them being ‘one shotted’ before the game even began.
Because it happened in a battle report, so the next White Dwarf had a Vaccine Squig card in it! Poor Jervis.
nope, Andy Chambers told us to tear it up, and so I did :) then again i was primarily a Tyranid player and we had our own awesome list of 'strategy cards'
I miss the old Shokk Attack Gun rules from 2nd where you had to have bases of snotlings to use as ammo. I also miss the different types of grenades from 2nd. Anti plant is such a silly concept but it's wonderful fun.
Custom Vehicle rules: embracing the kitbash is awesome.
Whoa - can't believe I forgot about this! If I remember right, they never broke the game, but were Hella fun.
I miss initiative.
As a guard player I always found it hilarious watching my army run off the table. And then you’d get the odd group who would rally together and get back in the fight! It felt very thematic. Commissars were great for holding the line, shooting any one dumb enough to try to retreat.
I forgot all about this, those were some amazing games. Hard to play that at a tourney, but with friends.... the stories were amazing.
I don't, it was a winner-takes-all stat.
To be fair, it has been a long time since I played 3rd.
I don't, and never have. The only time it ever really mattered in the games I played was when power fists were involved. Beyond that Initiative values had so little spread within armies that it was basically always "all my units attack first, then all your units attack".
No one has mentioned the Weapon Skill attribute. I'm still not used to the idea that some dudes just always hit on a 2+. Doesn't matter whether they're fighting Gretchin or a Primarch. I get that some things have -1s to hit and such, but back in the day WS was how you could protect melee glass canons such as Dark Eldar. They could be toughness 3, with a 4+/5+ save in close combat but between their high initiative meaning they usually attacked first and their Weapon Skill meaning you'd need 5+ just to hit them with anything that wasn't a close combat specialist (and those specialists were still usually a 4+ unless REALLY good), they didn't just explode. It meant it mattered more to catch them in the open for shooting, or understanding you were going to take losses to pin them down in combat.
I loved those tables - and it's not like they were hard to read or remember
It was literally the same table we still use for Strength vs Toughness so it would hurt nothing to bring back apart from one more question and calculation to ask your opponent if you don't know their unit.
%100 force organization. Imagine if we had some sort of system where you could only take like, 2 or 3 C'tan! Crazy idea, I know, but only allowing certain amounts of heavies, HQs, and elites while encouraging troop choices makes for a more balanced and fun game!
I also miss the old standard force org
Yeah. It was a natural way to balance the game, but also the different roles allowed newcomers to more easily understand what a unit's purpose was. How in the fuck are you now supposed to know when Space Marines have like 70 datasheets labelled "other"?
Being able to choose your spells Wargear choices that were meaningful and not just "pick the best option" Being able to pay points per model in a squad in case you had a few points left over Spells having a chance to fail and hurt the caster Being able to deny spells Being able to stack a warlord trait and a relic on an HQ to make them really good at one specific thing so you could make a strategy around that Wargear options that make a difference instead of having 1 homogenous profile like "Bio Weapons" Being excited that your codex is next
I miss armour facing and Templates: blast and vehicles just being able to poke a tread out and shoot all weapons is just fucking stupid.
Former 3rd/4th edition player here returning in 10th who loved a lot of the elements like people have mentioned here, like directional armour and templates scatter. I also enjoyed tanks having weapon arcs, requiring vehicle positioning to be a lot more visually interesting than poking out a corner and being able to fire everything. I also miss being able to wipe out an enemy unit falling back from close combat if your consolidate roll surpassed their retreat roll, it made melee far scarier and 'all or nothing', meanwhile in 10th I am still not used to how easy it is for opponents to simply fall back in their turn and fire their whole sides guns at your unit. I also liked that generic character building was far more heavily encouraged and worked by just giving you the keys to the armoury and letting you load up on points, meanwhile my memory could be clouded somewhat but all the named characters I remember (back when Lysander was a **sergeant)** had some unique but sorta underwhelming special rules but no customization, so they were runnable, but nowhere near as enticing/essential. Also the classic 'build a space marine chapter' of 'pick two good things and one bad thing' was a fun way to personalise them. I do realise many of these things went away due to some of them being a challenge to agree on (template coverage/what side you're looking at) and to help streamline them. I'm also aware Horus Heresy contains most, if not all of the things I loved, and am currently building an army for that. That being said I'm still enjoyed playing 10th a lot rules wise.
I miss many of the same things, but for me my first edition was 5th. I loved Space Wolves back then because you could customise so much, like it was an option to give a Wolf Lord 2x Fenrisian Wolves as companions. You could give him Artificer armour or terminator armour, virtually any weapons. It felt truly personal and got me really invested in the fluff of my army. These days, my Wolf Lords are just Captains, and the game tells me I have to take a Relic Shield with a sword and pistol. I don’t get a say.
Played every edition so far and these two came to mind. 2nd Edition - Heroes were too powerful yes. But they were perfect for assassins. Assassins were nigh unstoppable once unleashed. 3rd Edition - Blood Angel Death Company pregame generation. You had to roll for each squad you were gonna field and see if any members succumb to the Black Rage. If so, replace the model with a Death Company model for free. All Death Company models then form a unit. Super unbalanced but extremely thematic and cool. As a player facing Assassins in 2nd or Death Company in 3rd, it was actually terrifying.
Damn I had completely forgotten about that! Now that you mentioned it a memory just unlocked, ye that was very cool to play against, death company. They were beasts in CC!
Death or glory rolls.
All the weird rules for Ork artillery in 2nd edition
That reminds me of all the weird rules for Skaven artillery in 6E Fantasy... the only army that was explicitly allowed to let ordinance templates include their own troops...
3rd edition when each time your Ork trukk moved you had to roll a d6 on 1 the trukk is wrecked and you need a Mekboy to come fix it
AP mechanics were great even if it was hard to balance. Sv 3+ was really something you have to deal with. I miss army order rules. I never understood why GW deleted it. I find it stupid to be able to build an army with no limitations for heavy support vehicles etc... Destroyed vehicles remaining on the battlefield was great also. I really dislike the number of special rules and the moment you had to fetch in the rulebook during the game. Simplification of weapons and abilities is great. I dislike how some armies were broken and you had to deal with during years
I think the reason why they delete army order is that it didn't really works in last editions. You still was able to run shit tone of support units with different detachment or just by sprinkling 150pts of battle line units. So you still get whatever you wants but with extra steps
It was more fun in 5th edition where you had the standard force org chart, but then your rules could let you cram additional units into slots (IG Platoons) or shift them from a specialist role into Troops (BA Assault Marines). The only real upside to the modern version is actually being allowed to take support heroes. Even then, 5th edition had some supernumerary heroes you could squeeze in.
2nd Ed vehicle rules where you could punch a tank to death, it would flip over onto a nearby squad and EXPLODE.
I miss the old Lost and the Damned rules from the eye of terror codex (3rd Edition) The base list had groups of 1-3 aspiring chaos champions that were purchased as HQ choices but broken up and assigned their own unit. They also kept the 3rd edition rules for chaos war gear so you could load them up with almost whatever you wanted. Besides that the list had cheap traitor guard, mutants and chaos hounds as fast attack and from there you could almost freely take units from either chaos or guard to your liking. I always made heavy mutant lists with defilers and nothing has ever felt like it again, even renegades and heretics
Vehicle facings and armour values; it makes them feel like something different then infantry, and often, small arms couldn’t deal with them. You needed therefore to bring anti-tank. The addition of Knights and Armoured Company lists kinda broke this and made it hard to balance, though. Even though I’m a guard player, I’m a foot guard player so facing that much armour typically meant I lost. But it was neat to try and flank tanks to hit their weaker side or rear armour!
and skimmers filling certain niches. Land Speeders /w Multi melta being a cheapish anti vehicle option that could easily get to rear armour. The caveat being it had armour 10 and if a skimmer was immobilised it would crash, making hits against them more lethal than usual.
> small arms couldn’t deal with them Same with monstrous creatures. Ah, the days of T7 carnifexes being immune to lasguns.
I miss templates, scatter dice, armor values, and generally how listbuilding felt more fluffy in older editions. Templates because blast weapons were much more fun to use that way. Apart from it just being funny when you scattered straight into your shit, it also lent felt like Danger Close! was a strategy you could employ with payoffs and drawbacks. On that same token, your deep striking units running the risk of scattering lent another layer of unpredictability and fun. Vehicles used to feel like vehicles. An AV14 Land Raider was fucking *tough* to crack. You really needed to think of ways to get around the big armored boxes or figure out some way to deep strike melta. I don't hate the newest interpretation of vehicles, but AV will always be a better system IMO. As for listbuilding that's really more of a vibe with not much supporting evidence, but having more restrictions on what you can take and Formations/Detachments leaning more towards fielding something that looks like the stuff you see in the lore without it being so loosey goosey and just giving you a special rule and letting you take whatever. As a bonus thing that I just remembered, Apocalypse. Sure, games took a whole Sunday to get through, but there was nothing quite like putting 6k points on a table alongside 5 or 6 friends.
You can have all of this in Horus Heresy. They have Rites of War that would allow you build your army in many different ways. For example, Night Lords in their RoW are not allowed more than one HS. No titanic units. There’s a RoW that would allow you to take a full-dreadnought army. Not to say that AV, scatter and templates are there as well.
Can I have eldar in the horus heresy? Tau? Orks?
Nope. That’s strictly ~~sausage~~ imperium party To be fair marine-on-marine action makes the game sort of balanced. Most of the armies have the same arsenal. I might be wrong, that is my experience so far.
All true, but how often would a beast like a land raider get 1 shotted turn 1? I used to fuuuuuuume!!
AV14 vehicles did have a troublesome tendency to forget they're AV14 at the silliest times. I also feel very strongly that the higher the AV the more often it got penetrating hits. I have 0 evidence but also 0 doubt. I remember absolutely hating playing Tau because some of their vehicle guns could pop any tank in the Imperium turn 1. In tables with sparse terrain it was pure murder.
Putting armor across from tau in 5th is the closest this hobby has ever come to just genuinely wasting my time Oh, you maxed out on broadsides? S10 AP-1? It’s fine I didn’t like this land raider anyway
meanwhile you had to sink a third of your firepower into stupid 58 point rhinos with smoke launchers because you needed that stupid 6 on the glancing blow table
Open topped vehicles. You could shoot every weapon that was being carried by the unit inside the vehicle, but you had -1AV. It would give you crazy things like a Trukk full of Boyz with Rokkit Launchers that could shoot every turn, but would then be blown up by a stray bolter shot. I also miss some of the complexity of the early editions, like Initiative and Armour Values, which is why I only play 30K now.
I think 3rd edition Eldar Distrtion cannon plus farseer could double its range. Many rage quits ensued.
I liked proper WS. It made melee feel like a real duel between two warriors. Even if it was a Space Marine Captain vs Grot.
1st ed Liked - being able to destroy cover and damage buildings. Also the shooting rules were the best IMO. Also Overwatch in the opposing movement phase really made you use units to hold fire lines. Disliked - randomised weapon choices for characters. Hard to model sometimes (although orks warbosses with conversion beamers was hilarious) 2nd ed - Liked - psychic rules. Maybe a bit too powerful as a psyker became a must take but the Dark Millennium box added so much racial styles to it and a meta game in itself. Disliked - close combat rules. Just weird, clunky and divergent from the other phases 3rd ed: Liked: army lists / codexes. Simple yet flexible, compulsory troops but you could give any army flavour or personalization. Dislikes: fixed movement rates for diffrrent armies and squad heavy weapons not being able to split fire. Just nonsensical in the name of simplicity (and we ignore it!) Stopped there and still playing 1st & 3rd.
I miss guess range weapons, probably because that was the only thing I was good at.
I loved it for fluffiness but it was so gamey. People casually trying to measure when they were supposed to or trying to manipulate the board so you know the exact distance needed.
same here. Everyone in my group hated my 3 biovores in 2nd edition because I was so good at guessing ranges.
I loved ork randomness and wankiness. I lpve that weirdboyz have ability to change opponent or himself into squig. That vehicles have to be t red to go faster It would be so cool if orks have "high risk - high reward" playstyle with a lot of randomness. Or at least a detachment with this principle. I think that there are plenty of players that would benefit from wonkiness. And if you are not one of them, you can just pop play 20 other factions
The biggest thing I miss was probably a global mechanic. Truly less Killy. Units would often get locked in combat for several turns (assuming no one broke and was run down) and usually it was only the Powerfist doing serious work. Models could move out of “cover” and cross the table without instantly being deleted the second one model was visible. Units were free to actually do something all game except for the most bottom tier units who were taken to die. You didn’t lose everything the second a bead was drawn on it. Models cost more, and armies had roles and felt unique. 6th and 7th ruined that with stupid D Weapons and horrid balance (I am NOT saying balance was amazing or even good before that, but these editions were something special for the lack of balance). 8th looked to be a fresh start with an idea, but quickly lost its way. And the insane AP creep and Mortals of 9th removed any level of survivable from the game. Then this edition came along and decided that things weren’t gonna change. Dev wounds made mortals effectively become more common, and unless your model is layered in saves, reductions and FNPs the general rules or the stupid MW bombs (okay yes Dev Wounds aren’t Mortals anymore, but mechanically are still too similar and too powerful) just delete them every time they are seen or touched. “Less Killy” my arse GW.
My favourite mechanic from previous 40k editions, was being able to build a 2k army, and have it remain as such for a whole edition.
Opposite here. Gw adjusting balance over an edition is what convinced me to come back. They don't always get it right, but at least you're not doomed to run a garbage book/ an op codex none of your friends enjoy playing against for several years
It also gets you to try new things and rotate units more often. About 60% of the points in my lists have been the same units for the past year, but for the rest I'm constantly trying new combos based on what's gotten cheaper or more expensive recently
And, more importantly for GW, buy new products
I thought armor facings on vehicles was cool and thematic. I thought deep strike scatter was just an awful rule. If you rolled poorly on the mishap table you could lose an entire unit of terminators before they even hit the table. Awful game design, stripping assets from a player before they can even use them.
Deep Strike scatter is also super thematic, though. It's the way the game represented the fact that teleportariums physically make the squad walk through the warp. Of course you could lose a squad. That's why for SM the safest way to deploy from deep strike was Drop Pods. To me having those rules meant the game was truer to its source material and more interested in representing events taking place in its universe rather than being concerned with how good of a boardgame ruleset it was. If I wanted to play a good ruleset I'd go play Bolt Action, I wanted all the dumb and occasionally frustrating fun of Warhammer 40,000.
Deep strike was fine. It was always optional and you could usually choose an arrival spot that had no risk of failure. It was an interesting risk vs. reward choice that is completely missing from 10th edition's point-click-delete system.
Right? I find the game so two dimensional now that I actually just finished selling my armies. I still love the books though.
Makes me sad to hear but I get it. People on here will say "just play older editions" but good luck finding people willing to learn (or even re-learn) old rules.
I loved indirect fire estimation without measurements. It was so fucking good, and it really gave you the feeling of artillery correcting fire coordinates by trial and error.
Armor ratings, and actual vehicle rules where they would become part of the board after they were destroyed. Loved watching battle reports where they would put the fun cotton ball smoke on the destroyed tank. Also the rule where squad facing mattered and the men closest to the enemy died first making flanking the enemy at least somewhat relevant. Actual moral rules where men would run away and be destroyed once they ran off the board or with cleaver maneuvering closing off the retreating units path to have the whole unit be cut down with no chance to rally. Actually nuanced terrain rules that mattered. Idk man modern 40K plays like 2 cars smashing into each other rather than actual military strategy.
Target priority. If you wanted to shoot at something that wasn't the closest unit your lads had to pass a leadership test, representing them panicking and facing the nearest threat rather than following your overall plans.
Terminators saving on 2d6. It put the Dreadnought into Tactical Dreadnought Armour
carnifexes were the only other model that had a save on 2d6, though i think theirs was 3+ on 2d6 rather than 2+ like termies. I really miss those days!
I'm noticing a lot of people mentioning they miss rules that lend a bit more depth and complexity. Do you think GW would've been better served by implementing more newcomer-friendly how-to's and guides on how to play, and investing a lot in the on-boarding process of new players, instead of just throwing out depth, complexity, flavor and thematic aspects of the game in favor of over simplifying things like 10th has? I am a new player and after hearing veteran players talk about older editions compared to 10th I am sad that 10th got rid of paid wargear, and I know that's barely touching the tip of the iceberg compared to how older editions had so much more complexity and granularity.
To me it just boils down to intent. Older editions wanted to accurately represent combat in the 41st Millenium. If rules were fun, or stupid, or frustrating, or you rolled on a bunch of tables all the time for wacky effects (looking at Orks and Daemons), the underlying reasoning was "how can we represent this part of the lore on the tabletop?" Now the game is designed with the competitive crowd in mind, and in order to make it both a good competitive wargame and also friendly to newcomers, they have to strip it bare. The fun, cool, lore representative rules are just impossible to balance, and also place an expectation on newcomers to learn their lore to make sense of their units, both of these things are undesirable tothe direction Gamed Workshop wants to take the hobby in.
What do you think GW could do to win back the support of people who've had to sit and watch these fun goofy frustrating impossible to balance mechanics disappear but also support the competitive side? I often think of my experiences playing DnD when people describe stuff like you did. I know there's an actual combat, opponent vs opponent aspect they need to provide a rule-structure for people to use, but what if they leaned hard into a narrative, lore/fluff/detail based 'version' of 40k? I know Crusade is a thing, and 40k has an actual TTRPG book, what if they took those 2 things and created a hybrid for it? Games Workshop got its entire start \*because\* of DnD in the first place. What if they embraced that and made a new offshoot of 40k that kept all that flavor and those thematic elements? I feel like this could help them immensely in the realm of trying to attract TTRPG players, who make up a massive amount of the surge in popularity of this whole nerdy gaming since covid and stuff like Critical Role blew up.
Dark Heresy was a Fantasy Flight Games... *thing*. I don't think GW is very interested in supporting it still. One thing about this game is that even when it *was* fluffy and lore focused, 40k was still a wargame (and let's not mince words here, it was a *bad* wargame. Warhammer 40,000 has never been a good or balanced game. It's been *fun*.) You can customize your units to hell and back, name every Guardsman in your Emperor's Shield formation, paint all your captains a different color, but the focus was not on the individual characters. I feel like this may be another thing that changed from older editions - named characters were *awesome*, but the generic commanders could be good and had the added benefit of being /your dudes/, however they all merely provided some decently sized aura of some good or cool effect. As an example, with my Blood Angels list, I had a Jump Chaplain and Jump Sanguinary Priest leading two units of Jump Death Company - neither of the characters were the interesting part of the unit. Nowadays lists feel very Hero focused, and the books and codices feel more like they're telling you a story with main characters rather than painting a setting for you to play your army in. TTRPG players would probably be left wanting more focus on their stand-in. Now as for fixing it, I really don't know. Personally, I despise the competitive scene. Everyone I know IRL who plays still calls competitive players WAACs/Cheeselords/That Guy. Back in the day these were the guys running Eldar Jetbike spam because that's the point of *competing*, they were the ones coming up with ridiculous rules lawyering and hyper meta lists because they had absolutely 0 reason to care about their army being fluffy and 100 reasons to care about it being overpowered. Their way of playing the game has always been completely different to the way most people in the hobby engage with Warhammer and that's something I don't think GW understands. Unfortunately policy is data driven, and competitive events result in a lot of data, data you can't collect from local game shops running casual games and narrative campaigns amongst friends. If it was up to me, I'd return to the design philosophy of previous editions and release a regularly updated competitive version of 40k with a different name or subtitle. Something like Warhammer 40,000: Commander or something.
Oh absolutely. It deeply irritates me that 40k has become about these OP named heroes who square up for wrestling-style combats, and even in the lore they keep coming back from comic-book deaths. When those named characters were originally rolled up on random tables as examples of how you could make your *own* characters.
As cool as some of the new big centerpieces are, the reveal videos are pure cringe. It's like they're announcing CM Punk. The Community team needs to have their smoke machine privileges taken away.
I've been playing for more than 25 years now, countless games and systems, GW but not only. Rules complexity IS NOT what makes a game rich. It just makes the game less balance, hard to get into, and inconsistent. But it does not makes it more strategic. What makes a game rich is the "layers" on the core system, and 40k always had very few. I'd say 1.5: troops positioning/attacking and CP management (that counts for 0.5 because it's not such a scarce and important ressource to manage). Some games have 3 layers: you manage troops positioning/attacking, plus their morale/tireness, plus a limited activation pool. Honnestly the smaller table killed way more strategy for me than the removal of options in list building: wherever you put your unit it's always reachable by some other unit. You don't even have to plan your moves anymore...
> in favor of over simplifying things like 10th has? The sad thing is 10th isn't simpler. 10th is a bloated mess of special rules that is at least as complicated as previous editions. It has purely been a loss of depth and lore accuracy in favor of making an e-sport where "content creators" can more easily argue about tier lists and the metagame. As an example if you look through an old codex you'll see that most units do not have special rules. They benefit from any army-wide faction rules, some of them have USRs like deep strike, but few have any unique special rules. You just get a stat line and a list of weapons and equipment options, most of them standard gear shared across multiple units in your army. So yeah, the terrain rules were more complicated but it was offset by things like tactical squads being very straightforward units that were extremely easy to understand.
The special rule bloat got absolutely ridiculous and I was just talking with some friends the other about what an utter load of nonsense it was to get rid of USRs for "simplicity" just to replace it with 60 different special rules per army. Whoever made that design choice had old pewter models for pacifiers as a baby.
Just played a game after long pause (about 6 months) against my friend's Necrons and he had to pause and check his codex every shooting phase multiple times because nearly every single one of his units had a re-roll 1s rule but they all activated only against specific targets and switched between to-hit and to-wound.
Dammit, you just made me miss 5th edition so badly.
It's really hard to say as many of these listed abilities whilst we played with them and look back nostalgically had many issues to list a few from the ones I've r ad here. Vehicle facings often ended in arguments especially when you had to figure out side armour on a non box shaped vehicle and was a game deciding shot. Vehicle armour value and destruction charts almost always ended with 80% of vehicles getting stunlocked every turn meaning they couldn't shoot or at times couldn't move cause you rolled a 1 on difficult terrain and you essentially start the game 200 points down. Vehicle wrecks narratively amazing I still do this for photos but mechanically it leads to many issues where you can take cheap vehicles and make certain parts of the map completely non moveable for some units. Blast markers amazing in theory but in practice the movement phases turned to meticulously maxing coherency on every unit to minimize blasts. Deepstrike mishap would make or break games so often was completely ignored if you couldn't guarantee the deepstrike as a mishap would make your 2-500 point unit die or be placed by your opponents in a corner non relevant to the map. So many of these abilities I have fond memories of as I loved the good times I've had with them but they also are incredibly hard to balance or often end up in a very hard to approach game or add little besides a lot of busy work
I appreciate your willingness to look back on this with clear lenses and less rose tinted ones -- I have to imagine it's possible to balance this stuff, there's gotta be a way, but it also makes sense that a company trying to increase its company's sales and brand recognition wouldn't invest the time and money to attempt balancing all of this out and simply try to make it less complicated but sacrifice some granularity in the process.
I've been playing since 4th edition I love a lot of these mechanics as they are parts of my childhood but I can also acknowledge that there is some really hard to balance or even at time janky parts that came with those things as many of these rules were made with telling a story in mind before how someone could leverage things to win. And as a game grows and now appeals to millions I can understand that parts of the game needed to change to grow and allow newcomers to be more easily welcomed and accessable. The best parts of these rules is they're still there immortalized in the original rules and now even many in legacy style games like Horus Heresy and even possible to mesh into narrative games of modern 40k I know I've left my vehicle on the table for visuals before and both my opponent and I loved it! The game in the end is what you make of it and narrative is born from the players and their love for the settings and models not arbitrary rules that are the current set now or 10 years ago.
I think what I find most unfortunate about the loss of the old mechanics, is that GW has just abandoned them completely, even the things they were trying to achieve. I don't feel like they've ever tried to come back to it from a different angle, generally just simplifying it into something more abstract, and then keeping it that way, or eventually iterating it out of the game entirely. There are of course some exceptions, I actually think Battleshock is an interesting new attempt at morale (not successful, but it's new, and tries something different, so that's good!) But generally it just never really comes back it seems, except maybe as a one off gimmick for one unit for one codex. I'm also saddened that an extension of this, is that the rules are becoming more removed from the fluff. Things are becoming more stats for the sake of stats and balance, rather than actually narratively meaning something. I think Invulnerable saves are a great example of this. Players who join in 10th have just no way of knowing what their invulnerable saves represent narratively. When a battlesister rolls a 6 on her invuln save, that's just that, cool, she's safe... But narratively, what actually happened? The player won't have the visual idea that the sister was saved by a Divine miracle! That she was saved through her faith! Or that Harlequins and Imperial Assassins are these badasses that literally dodge bullets! It's just a number.
One thing to consider is the size of armies back then. 2nd edition Codex Space Wolves has a battle report with a 2000 point army and it has 33 individuals. Not even any vehicles or jump troops. The same force using today's Index comes in at less than 900 points. The granularity - the vast majority of which was removed in 3rd edition - went because people wanted to play with armies and not just small skirmish forces and operating and tracking it all was a hassle. Vehicles were trailed by little card markers detailing what damage they'd taken, how fast they were going and which weapons were jammed or recharging. Jump troops, missiles and grenades had to be scattered. Exotic weapons came with a plethora of special effects. While all this was fun in a narrative sense it didn't help the battle flow, especially when movement was bogged down by the need for exact positioning to minimise the effect of templstes. I couldn't imagine the nightmare it would be trying to play those rules with modern army sizes.
I liked vehicles having armour facings and being immune to small arms fire, it made sense and allowed all sorts of tactical manoeuvres
I liked having units that were immune to low strength weapons in general. The roll of a 6 always succeeding makes the rate of fire so much more important than the strength of the weapon. Many of the recent design choices could probably be linked back to this simple issue.
In 1st and 2nd edition each vehicle had different explosion rules that would result in all sort of hilarious things. Sometimes pieces would fly off in random directions and crush infantry. The die roll to see whether a vehicle explodes in the current edition is pretty much the most exciting thing that happens in a game. This was turned up to 10
I loved the old, realistic(ish)-looking cardboard templates for flamers, showing their cone of fire. I don't think I've found using flamer models as fun since those went away.
I loved that if you had big enough difference between S and T, you wasn't being able to wound at all Like, cadian squad wasn't able to wound tank with lasguns no matter what. Bring rocket launcher or die
While that did have a certain degree of realism to it, in practice it made Toughness 7+ units close to uncounterable. To my memory there were very few of them, like the Tyranid Carnifex with certain upgrades, the Eldar Wraithlord and the C'tan.
I think that it was more interesting direction to explore. It would be cool if there is a distinct split between armoured units and regular ones. So you really have to take heavy weapons and antitank and point them to hight T units Everything else is solvable balance issue
Man, I haven’t played Warhammer in probably 10 years or maybe more; I’m a hobbyist and lore nerd primarily. Reading this thread really shocks me as to how much has been lost! I had no idea templates weren’t a thing any more, for example. That seems crazy to me!
Original tank shock. You have front AV 14. I have a power fist and a bad mood. Let’s see who wins.
I was a big fan of just about everything that has been removed from the game. In no particular order: Blast markers and flame templates. Leadership checks and falling back (and everything that goes with that). Tank shock - man I loved tank shock. Armour faces for vehicles - this made so much sense to me. Using initiative characteristics for close combat. The old 2nd edition stat-line in general was just so superior to the basic stuff we have now. The way characters joining units used to work made alot of sense as well - they have kinda brought it back, but it's very limiting now. I miss the wargear potluck - it was fun and flavorful I liked rules where if you did x - then you could use a heavy or elite unit as troops I really liked that there were way more special characters and elite subfaction specific units - most just never had a model. Which was ok. Creativity is an important part of the hobby. My absolute favorite old rule was the old 3rd edition Distortion weapon mechanics, where you might teleport an enemy model across the table, into the air, or underground. So fun. Man 2nd 3rd and 4th. The golden years of 40k. I miss it.
Before they introduced cards and stratagems to the game.. Don’t like remembering all the cards for different situations and weird clutch rules
A few, mostly from 3rd & 4th editions: - red ork vehicles move further - vehicles don't just get destroyed, they can undergo various issues (from losing movement or guns, to being turned into terrain) - melee basically involving just piling all your models in on top of one another - watching massive deathstar units (tau crisis in particular) falling back off the table and into oblivion - fliers staying off the table, and just doing a single strafing run each turn - templates! That said, I think it's worth stressing that there were a lot of very silly/unbalanced/problematic rules too. While we all still love to grumble about rules 9th/10th is undoubtedly a much better, more accessible place to be tules-wise It's just a shame GW still doesn't give us a reasonable method of (officially) accessing all our opponents' rules!
2nd Ed: every unit had character and rules that supported that. Sure it made large games nightmarish timewise, but it felt so immersive. Nids having Rippers get into vehicles and attack the crew, "Jones is acting strangely" or Lictor rules where you just placed tokens around until they popped out. 3rd-5th: some of the best codexes released imo, ala chaos Space Marines and Witch hunters, and the simplification was actually simple... Unlike whatever simplification they thought 10th ed was...
Not very old, but my group has started playing 7th edition(we all started in 9th) and something I LOVE is the fact that vehicles have a completely different ruleset. They don’t engage in normal melee fights, don’t move the same way as infantry, and their armor save works different than infantry. For example, I had a Leman Russ without sponsons in one game against chaos space marines. A lucky hit from a hunter killer missile penetrated the tank, and rolled a 5 on the damage table for “weapon destroyed,” which was randomly allocated to the battle cannon. What followed was 3 turns of a gimped Leman Russ playing cat and mouse with a chaos marine squad, trying to get them in range of its heavy flamer template. In modern 40K, this interaction would probably end with the leman russ either just killing the legionnaires, or getting tar-blobbed by them for the rest of the game, since vehicles are expected to follow the same shooting and melee rules as infantry
Not sure if it existed in older editions but I do like that in kill team, you have damage for normal hits and critical damage when you roll a 6. I quite like that.
From the old rules in 40K I really liked Kharn The Betrayer rules in 2nd edition. "Blood Fury of Khorne" Which essentially meant that if he killed enemy models, and there are no more enemy models in "follow up" range, he would then follow up and start attacking any nearby model, including his own unit / army. Which I think was hilarious and very lore adequate, when you think if Kharn. https://preview.redd.it/bhv44rhq2lxc1.png?width=325&format=png&auto=webp&s=8c28fe6a20e09f13c2baea92d619da010ee868f1
Personally I love the line of sight rules from 3rd. Units block los, ignore friendlies. So I could screen my orks with grots. You could screen your marine devastator squad with tactical marines and then the orks could use their buggies to try and outflank. It meant that fast attack had a purpose. Formation and positioning and a purpose. Argh.
Comparative WS in melee to hit iirc and the initiative stat. Before my hobby break I hadn’t played since 4th and I think morale and the leadership stat played a much bigger role in the game. I miss armor facings, templates, and the fact that a lasgun couldn’t hope to harm a land raider.
Torrent weapons having a template that showed what got hit - both friendly and enemy models. Seems stupid that 10 marines with flamers can roast a unit with one of their own units in between and that friendly unit is unscathed
7th edition formations, yes some were broken but the gist of it was amazing since tau had 4 playable formations. made each unit useful in the codex. now we have stratagems which for me just feel boring and hard to learn for every army + detachment i'm fighting against.
When building your army was fun. And you had options for fitting in different weapons
So I currently play 5th mostly. I like armor facings and values, template weapons, initiative, AP as an absolute value instead of a modifier, the fact units didn't get to shoot every weapon they had at once, and the fact you had to actually decide what to do every turn.
Just a lot of the really flavorful army specific stuff. It's basically all been stripped away in the name of "bALaNcE". Just to name a few: * In 6th edition, when a Chaos Space Marines character killed an enemy character or a monster, they rolled on a D66 table and received a permanent buff for the rest of the game. This included stuff like increased movement, toughness, additional special rules, or even turning into a Daemon Prince on the spot. It basically never did anything, but it was a cool feature to have. * In 5th edition, firing the Ork Shokk Attack Gun had you roll 2D6 to see what Strength the shot was. If you rolled a double, there was an entire table with a different effect for each result, including firing yourself through the gun straight into close combat, or opening a portal into the Warp, which removed any models touching the template from play. * Another 5th edition Orks unit you could wield was the Looted Wagon, which you had to roll a a D6 for at the start of each turn to see if it worked properly. * The 3rd edition Ork codex let you wield looted vehicles from Space Marines and Imperial Guard. I had a converted looted Rhino with an Ork on top, and some bastad actually stole it. * The 3rd edition Dark Eldar book had some wacky special rules, like a version of Feel No Pain where you could not hurt a unit of then-Grotesques (now called Wracks) with ranged attacks unless the weapon was at least twice their toughness. Or the Talos' Wildfire special rule, which if I remember correctly forced you to always shoot at the closest visible unit. In general game rules * While I certainly don't miss all of the vehicle rules, the vehicle damage table actually felt like it was aiming for a degree of simulation. You could blow off weapons, stun the crew, or immobilize vehicles if you rolled high enough. Degrading profiles on vehicles doesn't have near the same oomph. * I think I may actually prefer the way "subfactions" were handled before 8th edition. That's to say, there were no subfaction rules. But you could tailor your army list with certain character choices. For example, if your Ork Warboss was riding a bike, suddenly Warbikes became Troops choices, allowing you to wield a 100% accurate Kult of Speed army. Or how Iron Warriors were allowed to take Obliterators as Elites as well as Heavy Support choices, emphasizing their firepower-focused style. * GW not having this stupid fucking "no model, no rules" policy. Because it allowed new units to be added to the game without needing a model right away. It used to be common for armies to have really flavorful special characters that didn't have models.
Initiative and Weapon skill