7th Edition and you: A trilogy in X parts... Editioning with a Vengeance

Right so after that delay I'm back, where was I?

So 7th Edition has changed things quite significantly all told and I saved one of the biggest changes till last:

Everyone scores.

Is that a Looted Fex scoring my objective?

Two simple words that change everything and open a world of possibilities.  Do I keep taking those cultists the internet says to use and let my elite/fast/heavies do my scoring or do I try and put rock solid Plague marines on the objectives and block out my opponent with objective secured to win that way?

Once you take everything we've talked about into consideration together you can see how things have changed.  Maelstrom missions getting scored turn by turn, everyone scoring, most troops having ob-sec.  You can try and gunline it up but unless you are confident you can table your opponent you better also be bringing some mobility.  You need the power to project scoring manpower across the board or armies like tactical heavy drop pod lists are going to wipe the floor with you, not because they killed you but because they are up by 5,10,15 maelstrom points.

Reecius at Frontline Gaming (Name drop my my current favourite 40k website, you guys deserve it) put together a similar list but it was loaded up in rhino's with scout from White Scars I believe.  60-70 tactical marines on top of you double tapping and ob-secing everything they need from turn 1.  Sure, most of them only have boltguns but that's 18 ob-sec units with combat squadding, you are gonna need to do something special to stop them drawing a full new set of objectives after turn 1.

Add in a Thunderfire or some such grabbing a backfielder because everything scores and killing the enemy becomes a minor part of your plan.

Wanna go Nidzilla? 2 min units of Rippers and go MC nuts, your Carnifex brood can score now.  It creates options and options are good, you don't want to end up playing the same army over and over.
I love this change, it makes the game less about lining up and shooting and more about holding objectives without making it a troops only game.

So who are the winners and losers of 7th:

CWE and Tau lost each other as battle brothers and skimmers lost passive jinking, probably good as these 2 were probably the strongest armies in the game.  The Wave Serpent and Riptide continue to be a little too good for their cost but it's improved.  Neither had amazing troops outside of Eldar jetbikes so everyone scoring does help them in that regard (ob-sec Wave Serpents and scoring Riptides...)
Lots of change but overall their position changed very little.

Chaos getting Helldrake nerfed leaves them in a tricky position, people not relying on shoehorning in cultists might create some new builds though, my guys are pure Slaaneshi so I'm still paying over the odds for bad I5 tac marines and the not too shabby but not very mobile Noise Marines :(

Now that is how you move and fire a guitar...

Imperials gained battle brothers with all imperials... wait what?
Now I hate the Imperials with a passion so I can't get into too much detail but if you can't put together some outrageous combo's from that I'll eat my hat.

I started talking about this but with how fast the new dexes are hitting it seems a little too fluid to really say what the meta is like or will be like even a short time after.

Personally I choose to ignore the doom-mongering, that the release schedule is too fast, the rules too bad to even play.  I think this is a great time to be playing 40k, 6th and 7th have been great editions for me and I can only hope this continues through as all the codicies get 7th ed updates.

It's not an idea tourney play kind of game, not unworkable if you want to use it for that but you will need to set some ground rules.  For having some fun with your friends, playing games that tell stories of epic battles I've yet to find it's better.  This isn't to say I wont, I just haven't yet.

Moving House

So starting a new blog when you are moving and without internet for a while lacks wisdom I see that now.

Things are settling down again now so the 3rd part of my 7th Edition review will be up soon and hopefully I can really crack on, just wanted to keep my handful of readers in the loop.

7th Edition and you: A trilogy in X parts... Part the Second

So last time we talked in general about 7th and the common arguments for and against.  Now we're gonna look at 7th in a bit more detail but I also said Unbound was great so lets start there.

Now unbound has been billed as very much antichrist-al in it's effect.  I choose 24 separate Obliterators, yeah I choose 7 Riptides, Well I choose 2 Transcendant C'Tan...

Steve brought his Emperor Titan again...

For a tournament by all means curb it, but you were gonna make the tourney your own and change things anyway to make it your own, it's one more line in the pack "Battleforged Only".  We choose to limit you to this type of legal army only, no harm no foul, these are our rules for these games.

Unbound comes alive when used by people not to make an abusive list, but when it's used to make a fun list.  Previously if a player wanted to run an armoured company (Outside of AM Forgeworld) they had to break the rules.  AM are the only faction in the galaxy that masses their tanks?  What if I want a Chaos armoured force, or Eldar, or Tau without Troops? Now I can.  What if I want to do a dirty dozen style character army? Now I can.  What if I want an Aspect Conclave of Banshee, Scorpion and Dragon? Now I can.

Now previously I had to break the rules, there was nothing stopping me before with friends but now it is legal, no need to break a rule.  What did it cost me to have that official stamp? Tourney have to say "Battleforged Only" seems like a good trade to me.  17 keystrokes to allow a chunk of your player base official freedom to go nuts with their armies while another can ignore it.

Not only that but I feel it helps show the direction the designers want to go.  They don't want a competitive game, it's clear that's not how the majority of them play.  They want a loose ruleset that gives you are the player freedom to make your fun with it however the two of you (or three or more we don't judge lifestyles here) want to.
Yes they want you to talk to your opponent before you play and you may consider that a weakness, in which case perhaps 40k is not the game for you, I love talking with my opponents beforehand about lists, scenarios and how their army fits together.
And that's the thing that I always feel like needs to be said more, if you don't like a game don't play it.  Life is too short to play games you don't enjoy, 40k will be what it will be and you cannot afford to fall prey to the sunk cost fallacy, it's what keeps MMO's in business.  If something in your leisure time isn't fun, don't do it, there are other games out there.

But I digress, so what did 7th edition actually change for better and worse?  I'm just gonna look at some of the big changes and the minutia may come up in course.

• It redressed the MC/Walker imbalance and buffed vehicles in general.

The Smash nerfs and removal of auto-hits mean vehicles can survive close encounters with MC's much more readily and that MC's are much less likely to double out people with a casual smash attack whereas the walker is likely still a S10 all day every day type of fighter.

The general vehicle changes didn't protect vehicles from HP spam but from single shots.  Yes I hear you "But Dunkel that means they did nothing because Wave Serpents" and I might have agreed with you had high power AT shots become more popular again.  Yes, I said weapons like Melta are becoming more needed.  The S7 spam of yesterday has to make way for the units of today.  

LoW and Forge World being in the core game means you could easily be looking across the board at Knights, Baneblades, Stompas, Land Raider grade chassis, Leman Russ.  Some of those things S7 can't even hurt and others it needs 6's to glance.  A Knight with it's Ion Shield requires 12 S7 hits to strip a single HP.  Once you are facing units like this you need something with more bite.

• Objectives placed before choosing sides.

It boggles my mind how big of a change this is and how little coverage it is getting.  Previously we were choosing sides then placing objectives in your deployment zone/no-mans land, now this happens beforehand.  As someone who finds gunlines incredibly boring to play as or against this is a great change.  You can put your objectives in your deployment but what if you lose choosing side? Now if your opponent deployed his objectives aggressively you are in serious trouble as he's at on 3 with 3 he can fight and your have 0 with 3 you can fight easily.

It's created a whole new game of how to place them to best effect and rewards armies that can get out and grab objectives as required, a welcome change in my book.

• The Maelstrom Missions

I'm gonna catch some flak for this one but I think they are great.  It needs a little caveat adding that allows discarding of those impossible objectives for new ones but otherwise I think they are great.  A common complaint it that your objectives changing turn to turn is immersion breaking for them and I can see that, I don't agree but I get it.  Since they are only generated after they are completed however I see it as a series of commands coming down the chain for armies that are on a roll

You took the hill, shot down the Harpy and challenged the Broodlord? Is there a Tyrant you can kill?

Best yet in keeping with the usual 7th edition system you have been presented with a tool, maybe you want to tweak the rules for your enjoyment.  Want to try shared Maelstrom objectives? That works, want to pair down the pack and use a custom card set, then do that.  It's that "Here's Everything" approach we talked about last time again.

• The Psy Phase

Yup, I'm going there.  Now if you read the internet you'll probably have noticed there are two groups of people shouting about this, one who say "Warp charge spam is out of control" and another who say "You get fewer powers off in 7th than in 6th" the problem is despite them wanting to change the game differently they can both be somewhat right.

Odd right?

A single Mastery 3 psyker went from generating 3 warp charges per turn and passing on LD10 for casts to generating an average of 3.25 charges, seems like a buff, moving on right? Wait, that's not quite how it works.

That average assumes every 2 dice will turn up one 4+ and thus a charge.  What about if you cast three powers and one of them turns up two of those expected successes?  Your powers have gotten less reliable right off the bat.  Realistically you need to be throwing more dice than you *need* to get anywhere near the old success rates, this in turn means fewer powers getting cast.

So what about 4 level three casters? 12 Warp charges in 6th an average of 7.75 in 7th.  Way weaker in fact, so what is making caster spam so strong?  Summoning and the new invisibility.

Some Daemon armies can rattle off 30+ dice a phase and they can pour them into summoning more Daemons which while they can't summon can generate more charges.  Now these are WC3 powers so you really need 6-7 dice from reliability but you are still talking about adding 4 new squads each turn, bolstering your army by 400pts.  

You will never win a timed tourney with this list as you are going to be slow getting all this down but it can be strong throwing down those extra troops.  However you are just throwing more and more cannon fodder down and if your opponent can handle hordes he is going to be racking up the kills and potential VP's

Invisibility is... well just a bit too good.  It buffed an already good power and gave deathstars something extra.  The immunity to blast and template weapons can create units that are a real issue for many armies.

Add in that with the new system these powers only got slightly easier to dispel due to their blessing nature and the problem despite being sometimes overstated, exists.

Witchfire on the up side got a significant boost and I've been enjoying the idea of it more and more.  Being able to shoot separate targets with it, not counting towards weapons fired and being able to fire multiple witchfires means you can generate some fairly impressive psy-dakka.  Add in onto a platform that can already shoot (Lash Keepers, Devourer Tyrants etc) and you can really drop some serious number of wounds.

I think I've rambled enough for another time. Next time I'll finish up with a few final 7th edition thoughts, talk about how various armies have been affected in my eyes and sum up.

7th Edition and you: A trilogy in X parts...

So we're starting big, we're gonna talk about the elephant in the room, 7th edition, this is probably gonna be a multi-parter so stay with me.

Now this one has divided the community pretty solidly and it's easy to see why.  A combination of 2 year turn around, not being too different from 6th Ed and coming out before a full round of codicies has been released has put people on the back foot right away and that is perfectly understandable.

Before you even open the book it has those things working against it.  The rulebook is essentially the buy in price for 40k and we've been asked to pay it again in half the usual time.  Worse the changes it has made are not that significant so it leaves the question "What was so important that it couldn't wait?"

The answer? Probably not enough to justify a full new edition.  Now don't get me wrong, I'm loving 7th edition.  It fixed some things that should have been fixed and didn't fix others but at it's core I find the game to be more fun than any edition since 2nd but I don't think we needed a new edition to get here.

It's here now though so what does it mean?  Well it's going to affect you differently depending on what kind of gamer you and your social group are.

7th Edition seems to have taken the idea of "Here is all of 40k, if you don't like bits then don't use them" which it seems common to write off as poor writing on the part of the designers usually championed by "Why should we pay for a product then change it" and that's fine.  I don't agree with the statement but that kind of system can cause problems.

For PUG games where the player rocks up no game arranged, doesn't really know the group his odds of getting a fun game have reduced.  All of 40k could await him, his opponent could have 2 Transcendant C'Tan and then all Annihilation Barges in an orgy of unbound death or his opponent could be running his all footslogging Howling Banshee Jain Zar list or anything in between depending on the mindset of the folks he is about to play.
Where 7th edition begins to shine is where the players have gone that extra yard and made that transition from "I have come to play" to "We are going to play".  Where conversation and social interaction has forged a group of like minded players who recognize some lists are stronger than others and that turning up with an army that will be far stronger or weaker than your opponent is pretty poor form.

Now these men are ready to play 40k...

Now, this is where the next common argument comes up:
"If the rules were better balanced you wouldn't need that conversation"
And to a degree this is true, it is however also to a degree false.

If 40k was built where every single unit was perfectly to the point balanced against against every other unit then it is true.  I could bring 45 Swooping Hawks and you could bring 100 Guardsmen with 20 Heavy Bolters and somehow it'd come down to the best player, awesome.
Thing is what about when your opponent instead brings 5 Wraithknights...
A Heavy Bolter is worth very little against a Wraithknight, especially compared to a Lascannon say.
Against 20 Banshees however the Heavy Bolter is worth *more* than a Lascannon.

An even trickier balance question, now many points is being able to move 12" a turn worth?  Your objectives may be the other side of the table or they might be in your deployment.  Your opponent might be a charging tide of Fleshhounds or a AM gunline, that value varies hugely.

40k armies are so diverse that the mythical "perfect balance" just isn't possible.  Even if you managed to balance the points against a theoretical "Average List" people could still bring extreme lists and throw the whole thing out of balance.  The only way you can stop it is to remove extreme lists.

This is good for tournament play perhaps but reduces the options available which is bad for everyone else.  An example is based on an army I myself love the idea of: Chaos Deathwing. Abaddon and nothing but squads of Terminators.

Now the army would be an extreme list (All 2+ save infantry) and would even be Unbound (A replacement for the word broken on many forums) but it would not be tourney winning list, it's very much a casual middle of the road at best list.

I think that'll do as an opening salvo, next time I'll talk some more about 7th edition in general, why Unbound is great (You heard me internet) and get into some of the changes and how it changed the game.

Wyrm Talk is born!

So after years of just ranting on forums and discussing with friends I figured I'd take the time to spread my thoughts to a wider audience and immortalise them on the t'internets.

So what is this gonna be? Well it'll be me talking about Warhammer 40k basically.  The rules as they stand, new releases, I may branch out into batreps though I tend to not keep a record as I enjoy just being able to play the game.

What I'm not gonna talk about is painting and modelling because when it comes to that I am a 10 thumbed chimp, I'm gonna focus on the rules, tactics, maybe a bit on the background.  I am a reformed munchkin. back in the day I was a big tourney gamer but more recently I've moved to a more casual view of the game so hopefully I'll be able to keep a foot in each world and my posts will represent that.

In terms of comments feel free to disagree with anything or everything I say but the instant you fail to show proper respect to your fellow posters you are done.
So without further ado: