Chewing-on-Wargame-Scenery-Review: WH40K7E

[Koumei]

What? Seventh Edition, you ask? What the fuck?


Yes, D6Ed was... not a success. They even made a sort of revised-compiled rulebook at one point that was updated with all their errata. Yeah, they did one thing right in that they were actually fixing rules instead of going LALALA CAN'T HEAR YOU FUCK OFF. But... let me put it this way. In 5th, 4th and probably 3rd edition, here is what your army could be:
1-2 HQ choices
0-3 Elites choices
2-6 Troops choices
0-3 Fast Attack choices
0-3 Heavy Support choices
+Potentially one Dedicated Transport for each of the above, and possibly a couple of "slotless" things (like "This HQ can take that squad as a retinue, it doesn't take a slot")
Also some armies could swap it around a bit.

Here is what it looked like at the end of d6Ed, as part of the rules, without needing opponent's permission:

Primary Army
1-2 HQ choices (1 is the Warlord)
0-3 Elite choices
2-6 Troops choices
0-3 Fast Attack choices
0-3 Heavy Support choices
0-1 Fortifications (an AA emplacement or a bastion with a lascannon)
0-1 Lord of War (not the same as the Warlord. It's an Apocalypse Superheavy in normal play!)
+dedicated transports and whatever
Optional Allied Army
1 HQ
0-1 Elite
1-2 Troops
0-1 Fast Attack
0-1 Heavy Support
+dedicated transports and whatever
Imperial Armies: Optional Allied Inquisition Detachment
1 HQ
0-3 Elite
+dedicated transports

Oh and you can double all of the above if the game is 2000 points or more. Protip: the standard was 2000-2500 before this (having risen from 1500), but after 6Ed people would typically set the game size to 1999 points. No really.

I think I need to dig up another "fuck you" image macro. But instead you can have this:


I should now add a disclaimer: I haven't played since before sixth edition and I have no intention of changing that. But I like to stay up to date, similar to how we keep up to date on PF and D&DNext.

So what do people want to hear about first?
A. The first codex (Orks)
B. PSYKIC POWERZ
C. Cleaning things up and cutting down on bullshit
D. Tanks
E. How do I built army?
F. Changes to how the game actually gets played now
G. Put it in (sorry, forgot it's not a dating sim)

[OgreBattle]

What are the basic tactics of the game in 7th edition other than "Find cover and throw s7 firepower from across the board". Like an introduction to 40k army types and tactics, nothing army specific. Did 7e nerf anything in particular? The main change I see is vehicles can't be 1-shotted by anything that's not ap1 or 2.

[Dean]

Tell everyone about the batshit new rules where your allowed to play an army made of 11 Hive tyrants, Ghazghkull, and all 4 Chaos greater daemons.

[Koumei]

Well so far, it looks like this:
1. Wash your mouth out with petrol, we will not be having that S7 bullshit. Go S8+ or go home, because Armour 14 is important again. It's not just that you can't 1-shot the tanks without AP 1 or 2, the fact is you can still hold/contest objectives from inside a tank, and vehicles are allowed to be scoring. If you can take a Land Raider as a Dedicated Transport for a Troops unit, or are using the standard formation rules (ie 0-1 HQ, 2-6 Troops, 0-3 Elites, 0-3 Heavy, 0-1 Fort, 0-1 LoW), then that Land Raider itself is actually a scoring unit that can sit on the terrain and tell you to go fuck yourself, even if the unit is not inside it.

If it's a DT for a Troops unit and you're using the standard formation? Then you have Objective Secured: that fucking Land Raider steals objectives out from underneath enemy units that don't also have Objective Secured. That's right, three units of Dire Avengers rock up, but they took a weird formation or something, so your one Land Raider sits there and says "Lol, I have the objective, you do not".

5th edition was tanks edition. Well this is the second tanks edition. IIRC, Weapon Destroyed still blows a random weapon off, and Shaken/Stunned still lets you snap shot, so basically, tanks aren't just sitting around being stunlocked.

2. The allies matrix changed: fewer forces are BFFs with one another, but being Allies of Convenience is nearly as good, and Allies of Desperation is not as bad as it used to be. And you can ally with "Cometh the Apocalypse", it's just a little bit worse than the old "Allies of Desperation". Basically you'd throw them in as an assault force that attacks the enemy but doesn't do objectives and stays away from your main force. You can now ally with yourself. Long story short, you won't be seeing the old thing where one DE hero with the 2++ Save hangs around with a Seer Council for the re-rolls on failed saves.

3. There are two types of game, and thus two types of army you need. The first is objectives, and that still means "you need to hold objectives in the last turn, with all former turns counting for nothing". You want units that survive, you want to be able to force enemies off objectives, you might want to invest in late-game "zoom onto the table and grab something" things like Outflanking Jetbikes.

The second (and new) one can give you points every turn, and you draw cards to determine what missions you can achieve. Once you achieve a mission, you get a victory point and discard that card forever. Once per turn you may discard *one* card without achieving it, if you think it's impossible. You can't draw cards to put you above a hand of five, so you really want to try to secure all five on every single turn. This means you need a force that can react: you need scoring units, you need units that can cover a lot of ground, you need ways to take independent characters out, you need to be able to put torrents of fire on enemies.

So the first one will see the return of bulky tanks full of scoring dudes, and units that have good saves and re-rolls on saves, and probably a handful of "three jetbikes" type units specifically for foiling opponents in the lategame. The second one will see more of your "multiple small units", and an emphasis on speed.

In theoretical/tournament play where the cost in dollars is not an issue, you can still expect to see a lot of the same MVP units you saw before - Helldrakes, Vendettas, Waveserpents, "Ten Marines in two Razorbacks".

[Koumei]

Tell everyone about the batshit new rules where your allowed to play an army made of 11 Hive tyrants, Ghazghkull, and all 4 Chaos greater daemons.

So you're probably going "Ahaha, Dean speaks in jest!"

Hahaha, nope.

Objective Secured is really good, but you can play "Unbound". Basically, you can ignore the Forge Organisation list, and you can ally multiple armies together (although you still pick a "main" army, which determines who gets to hold objectives and who the Warlord is). So yes, you could actually do the above thing, points-allowing. Granted, that actually means you have zero scoring units, so your only hope in Objectives is to clear the board or to score First Blood (likely), Slay the Warlord (possible), and maybe Linebreaker (I can't remember if that's "end with a unit in the enemy deployment zone" or "end with a SCORING unit in the enemy deployment zone") while denying literally every objective. Remember that if the enemy is not unbound, you can't deny by sitting on an objective, you actually have to keep them out of range because OBJECTIVE SECURED MOTHERFUCKER. In the second type of game they'd be great for all "Kill X" cards, but every single "capture X point" card would be wasted. Remember you can only discard once per turn.

Overall, that example wouldn't actually be effective - it works better as an example of why unbound is stupid. But there are some effective things unbound can let you do. It was probably invented 100% just to let new players bring "whatever minis they bought because they look cool".

[OgreBattle]

objective secured was an interesting counter to unbound lists. So what would be the strongest unbound list, something that can just wipe the enemy off the board? I imagine spamming a low-cost, high firepower vehicle could work, like 20+ killa kans and fusion piranhas. I haven't seen any super killer unbound lists yet though.

[Koumei]

That's because your opponent needs to just have one model surviving and in reach of an objective to win. You need to eliminate every single model down to the last in order to win. Anything in between is a draw. Unbound generally isn't the best option, and I can't tell if it's better to go for a hard-hitting annihilation force or to keep scoring, just with "the best units" - like Eldar Troops in Wave Serpents plus IG Troops in Vendettas plus a bunch of Floating Cron Options plus some Daemons as backup.

[Username17]

I have looked deeply into it, but if your 'main force' secures objectives with troops, I would think the correct choice would be to field a few dozen 3 elf squads of snipers with a craft world eldar warlord and then take your truly massive number of remaking points and spend them on basilisk cannons.

-Username17

[rasmuswagner]

I'm just happy that my little green dudes now have a codex that isn't written in cunieform on clay tablets.

[Koumei]

I think the newest dex, the only 7E dex so far, is pretty decent from what I've read on the interwebs. Orks deserved a new dex really. And here are the big things to note:

1. No slot-swapping. By which I mean taking a Warboss in Mega-Armour doesn't let you take Mega-Nob squads as Troops, and putting him on a bike doesn't let you take Biker-Nobz as Troops. Interesting fact: you can actually have regular orks on bikes, they don't have to be nobz! (And at the price, it's not actually a terrible choice) Future sub-dexes will probably do this - expect an e-book Speed Freakz list that puts bikes as Troops but cuts out certain other things.

2. There are only three random tables. One is the ork-only Psykic Power table (and it's not shite, but likewise there are no super-golden powers that you want to build a whole list around). One is the ork-only Warlord Traits table (it's mostly good - the worst one is "you get +1 Strength"). The third one is what happens if you fail a Morale/Pinning Test. Basically, Fearless has gone through so many changes that you can't just slap Fearless down across a whole army without some drawback (Daemons: Instability, Nids: being the Nids, which fucking suckInstinctive Behaviour, Chaos Meringues: very expensive). So Orks aren't Fearless. What happens is, you make a Leadership Test as normal for Morale/Pinning, and there are things that let you re-roll this, but if you fail, you roll on the following table:

1. In Combat? You actually pass, you just stay in the fight. Out of combat? You are confused by not being in a fight, so you fail the test as normal.
2. You fail as normal, unless there is a character in the unit, in which case you pass but you take some casualties as he convinces them in the face.
3. You pass the test after all, but take a bunch of casualties as they have a fight over the matter.

For the record, there are things that let you re-roll this. So you can actually get Ld, Ld-reroll, this, this-reroll. Which means you can usually handle leadership, more or less, and it's not left completely to fate (although small, elite units like Lootaz will feel the pain).

In other words, orks are practically the least LOL RANDUM dex at the moment other than Necrons. If you expected any dex other than Chaos to be full of random fucking tables, it'd be this. So seeing that level of restraint suggests they know people hate the random table obsession and are making an effort. Over all, this book is pleasing.

[Ghremdal]

I see there is some confusion about scoring. Everything scores (bar some specific things like fleeing units), in Battleforged (force org restrictions) and Unbound lists (anything goes.

Battleforged has the advantage that it gives its TROOPS choices the rule Objective Secured; which means that no other unit can contest the objective they cap, unless it also has Objective secured.

Dedicated transports also get Objective Secured if they are chosen for Troop choices. Which is a big deal since you can get things like Drop pods, Land raiders and Waveserpents with Objective Secured.

Unbound lists are great for a beer and pretzles games amongst friends. They are NOT a thing for tournaments, or any kind of serious play. So while they can be unbalanced, it won't be a issue.

[Koumei]

Yeah, Unbound is going to be the new thing for "bring and play" in the stores. On the plus side it lets you just assemble and paint the minis you personally like.

[Voss]

The psychic rules need discussion (and sadly I don't have time for it this morning). Because the whole thing is Serious Math Fail (in particular chance of success at casting vs chance of dispelling, within the subset of when you actually can), with unlimited daemon summoning spam on top of the shit cake.

Bonus for bringing (and summoning) extra psykers solely as mana batteries, which is something they did in fantasy for a while, but took out in later editions because it was clearly fucked and broken. That the reintroduced it essentially as rewritten into 40k is worth ALL the wtfs.


Considering the whole edition amounts to ~10 pages of errata for 6th, GW is making no effort to hide the fact that they are just farming idiots at this point.

[Koumei]

Sure. They decided to add a Psykic Phase, much like WHFB has a Magic Phase unto itself. The earliest editions of 40k probably had a Psychic Phase too. Anyway, it is resolved after movement but before shooting, so powers that are resolved as shooting don't prevent you from also firing the gun you're holding. Note: it seriously doesn't count as shooting, so if you MIND CRUSH someone, you can then shoot someone else in the shooting phase, but that means in the assault phase you have to assault the dudes you fired actual guns at.

So, the psychic phase rolls around. Every psyker knows some number of powers that were rolled randomly from a table, and if all their known powers are from the same list, they also learn the primaris power from that list for free. Multiple people can have the same power, unlike spells in WHFB. Each psyker has a Mastery Level, too, and you generate a number of psi dice equal to your combined total Mastery Levels.

Any given person can cast any number of powers per phase, but can only attempt any given power once per phase. Any power has a rating, usually 1-3, and when you decide to use a power you then roll any amount of psychic dice, subtracting them from your pool for the turn. Every 4+ counts as a "hit", and you need a number of hits equal to the rating of the power. If you roll multiple sixes, then you suffer the Perils of the Warp, so you roll on a table and bad things happen to you.

When your opponent has a psi phase, you generate defence dice. Which IIRC is calculated the same as your own psychic dice - add up the mastery levels. I can't remember the specifics of defence. I *think* the way it works is:
A. If a unit is targeted, they can elect to roll any amount of defence dice. Each 6+ negates 1 of their hits and you need to negate all of their hits to negate the power, not just "reduce it below the minimum needed".
B. If a unit has Adamantine Will or something, they negate on a 4+.
C. Some units (Psykic Hood?) get to negate powers that aren't targeted against them.

Basically what it means is powers that successfully activate are not going to be negated. But expect Perils to happen, and expect it to kill some of your psykers.

[Ghremdal]

As someone who actually plays, Ill try to answer some questions.

First off, I agree with you that the psychic rulesare not that good. They are not exactly terrible, but I prefer the Fantasy system. GW apparently want a unreliable psychic phase, and that is what the rules facilitate.

The biggest contributions to the unreliable is the way you choose power, or rather you don't. Its just a d6 roll, and most psykers have a 1/6 or 1/3 chance to get the power they want. You always can get the basic discipline power, so at least you got some guarantee. And most basic powers are okay to good.

The second is the way you manifest powers. Your army generates d6+manifester level warp charge (d6's). Once you decide what power you want you take a amount of d6, and for every 4+ rolled you get a success. If the # of successes is better then the Warp charge cost of the power (from 1 to 3) it goes off. Which means if you want to be using lots of powers, you need to bring psychic batteries with you; that is psykers that do nothing much except provide warp charges that you use with your main psyker(s). If you just want to cast a power or two, it mostly works fine. Also if you roll 2 or more sixes, you get to roll on a fun table to see if you and your units explodes or not.

Dispelling works the same way, but to get a success you need a 6+ on your roll, and you need to equal the number of successes the manifester got. You can get some modifiers to that roll, so you can build your army to prevent powers affecting your guys; but you can probably do shit against buffs to his own guys (though it can happen).

TL;DR version: Either invest in psykers or bring none is the 40K way of doing thing. I don't agree with it, I think the fantasy way is much better then what they have now.

Secondly, Daemon summoning, is shit. It looks good on paper, but its a fucking trap option. Against any reasonable list, it gets shot to pieces before any summoning starts.

I also agree with you that the changes from 6th to 7th could do with a 10 page errata.

EDIT: ninja by Koumei.

[fectin]

The psychic batteries thing sounds a lot better than the 6E thing where the guy who brought an Eldar choir spends the first 30 minutes of every turn slowly working through each model's powers.

[Ghremdal]

There is a rule that a unit can only attempt to cast a single power only once, even if there are multiple psykers that know the same power in the same unit.

So things like the seer council, get only one shot at powers like conceal; but for larger councils its more reliable then before so things have not changed that much from 6th.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Every time I get tempted to get into the WH40K minis something like this comes out and completely validates my decision not to get involved.

It's a pity, honestly. I love the aesthetics of the Imperial Guard and Orks. I've always been a fan of forces that were individually shoddy and chaff but got asymmetric advantages in certain tactical situations. And God help me, but I love these factions' vehicles. I also like the Tau, too, but them being retconned into slaving aristocratic Maoists depresses me too much to give them a whirl.

[Koumei]

Every time I get tempted to get into the WH40K minis something like this comes out and completely validates my decision not to get involved.

I like to think that means my reviews are a form of community service.

By the way, "C. Cleaning things up and cutting down on bullshit" was a joke. Largely they just took all of the expansions and other crap and pasted it in as core. Such as the bit where suck it up, you have to accept that your opponent can field a Baneblade. They can probably fit it into a 1,000 point army for that matter.

Monstrous Creatures took a mild hit in that Slam is now "instead of attacking normally, make one attack at double Strength (so S 10 in basically every case)" rather than "halve your attacks, but double Strength". FLYING Monstrous Creatures are better though: they only have to test for grounding if they suffer an unsaved wound, and if they are grounded, they're allowed to assault you on their next turn.

But basically, if the game improves beyond the d6E mess, it will not be by changes intrinsic to 7E but by individual codices being good.

[Lago PARANOIA]

I know it's a petty thing to complain about, but, I'm still super-pissed off that the jackass GW fanbase and writers keep villainizing the Tau.

Aside from the fact that it's shitdark (I know, big surprise with this fandom) the only point of having the Tau would be to make them the plucky young upstarts who through multiculturalism and science defeats the Space Nazis. If you just make them About As Evil As The Star Wars Empire, there's no point to having a faction that intersects so poorly with the metaplot.

[Omegonthesane]

I know it's a petty thing to complain about, but, I'm still super-pissed off that the jackass GW fanbase and writers keep villainizing the Tau.

Aside from the fact that it's shitdark (I know, big surprise with this fandom) the only point of having the Tau would be to make them the plucky young upstarts who through multiculturalism and science defeats the Space Nazis. If you just make them About As Evil As The Star Wars Empire, there's no point to having a faction that intersects so poorly with the metaplot.

They fill in the niche of "looks like a mecha anime while still being on sensible scale" and possibly something about shooty tactics that don't work so good with the Imperial Guard.

Also, they're the only faction definitely younger than humanity, and have been part of the metaplot for at least 8 years now.

[Lago PARANOIA]

Or they could just give those aesthetics and tactics to another faction.

Also, being part of the metaplot doesn't mean being important to the metaplot.

[Chamomile]

I am extremely fond of the 40k setting because it is a place where everyone is the bad guys and therefore the fully correct course of action is to be Cao Cao and found your own faction with which to beat the tar out of all the others, straight down to the best way to do this probably being to usurp the current reigning powers in the Imperium and use their nominal leaders as figureheads while running things however the Hell you want. Given this, having the Tau removed as a legitimate good guy faction is actually a good thing for me, because it means I can go back to looking at the setting like a Risk board where every single part of the board that doesn't have my flag on it is a completely legitimate invasion waiting to happen.

[Dean]

The thing you've just said is a tall order in the same way that Everest is a tall dirtmound, but the direction the Tau was moving in was actually exactly what you were saying. They have lots of fluff about meeting human groups and getting them to join up as part of the greater good. I thought if that direction kept going it would be pretty cool. If the Tau just became a Mercenary style force where you had about half Tau units and a half motley of Kroot, Imperial Guard, Praying Mantis bugs and a couple Eldar it would be badass. Giving the grimdark setting a tiny mote of hope who's goals are totally impossible given their scope is fine, even good for it. Even the most Grimdark universe could use a few King Arthurs scattered around and you can tell that GW knows that because their fluff is choking on them they just make them all in stasis or missing or currently unknown or whatever.

[OgreBattle]

I know it's a petty thing to complain about, but, I'm still super-pissed off that the jackass GW fanbase and writers keep villainizing the Tau.

Is it like that in the Tau codex though? The novels, RPG's, videogames, tend to be written by outsiders that add in their own ideas. As far as I know the maodark 1984 brainwashing camps only occur outside of Codex stories.

But not a fan of Tau battlesuits, they just have their legs stick out from a torso without hips/abdomen, making them look very top-heavy. It's easy to fix though:

adding more bulk to the lower body helps balance the overall silhouette


It's also cute that the imperium and orks all use mecha and vehicles with chibi moe~ proportions



waaaaaaaaghhhuuu