OSSR: WH40K, 3rd Edition

[Username17]

OSSR: WH40K
Armies of the Imperium


There are people who unironically think these are the good guys. That is terrible.

Koumei:

Commissars are obviously modeled on Soviet Commissars (there are a few hints, such as the fucking name), but they remind me of the Nazi SS in that of all the forces in the army, they have the really stylish awesome uniforms that turn heads. When people bang on about how good Nazi uniforms were (often trying at the same times to distance themselves from neo-fascists, good luck with that!), they’re not talking about brownshirts, they’re talking about the SS. And Commissar jackets, trenchcoats and hats look totally sweet.

History has taught us that looking great is not justification for genocide and warmongering, however, so this isn’t saving the Imperium.

Anyway, as Frank is about to mention in a bit more depth, this game was not just an update on the previous one (whereas you could sort of take your 3E army into 4E and just be at a mild disadvantage from basic power creep or some abilities working differently). Likewise from 5th to 6th and from 6th to 7th – they were the incremental changes of D&D 3E to 3.5 where maybe your specific character suddenly sucks because someone had a hate-on for chargers but if you had made a Wizard under the old system, chances were good that you barely had to change anything other than allocate your Scry skill points into a new Knowledge or something, maybe adjust your prepared spells, and any old prestige classes not yet updated could still basically work (for non-casters, probably better than once they DID update them!). 2E to 3E in Warhammer 40K was a lot like 2E to 3E in D&D where you were doing it all from the ground up and your old codex was suddenly meaningless.

I’m going to add some bonus entertainment by adding a reason why fans and players of each given faction are the worst people. Not the reason why each in-setting army are the worst people or the most stupid or the conceptually dumbest, though that is also possible, just “why you should avoid people who play this”. If at the end of this review you decide to avoid all 40k players, I will have done some good in the world.

FrankT:

A wargame isn't a playable thing without army lists, which is why 4th edition was such a slap in the fucking face. Anyway, all the rules and shit only means anything to anybody in reference to the actual soldier mans you re marching around on the table, and 3rd edition scrapped backwards compatibility with old army lists entirely. And in order to make that not mean that 3rd edition was an unplayable pile of slag on release, there are minimalist army lists for all the supported factions in the basic book.

Supported factions in this case is: Space Marines, Chaos Marines, Imperial Guard, Craftworld Eldar, Dark Eldar, Sisters of Battle, Orks, and Tyranids. Which means that Squats, Harlequins, Daemonworld, and Cultist armies from the previous edition could all go pound sand. Not that there was really a lot of support for any of those fuckers in 2nd edition, but they were all nominally playable and the angry tears of space dwarf players who realized with the publication of 3rd edition that they had not yet gotten a full codex for their army because they were fucking never going to get one was a deep well of schaudenfreude if you like that sort of thing.

There are enough armies on this list that we're going to tackle them in two parts: Imperial Armies and “the rest of them.” The Imperial Armies differ from any other army because there was a small list of “Heroes of the Imperium” that you could take for any faction that happened to have the Imperial tag: Marines, Guard, or Sisters. This was like a weird little appendix that most people forgot actually existed, so if you ended up using any of it you could expect incredulous stares or people accusing you of cheating. Obscure rules for the wins!

Koumei:

Note: I do like the schadenfreude because it’s nice to know someone else has it worse.

Anyway, way back then, I found that people were okay with an Imperial player taking a single Assassin. They will look at you weirdly if you take anything else like a Priest or an Inquisitor, and multiple Assassins were right out, but adding one Eversor or whatever alongside your Space Marines. In my case it was a Callidus. I wanted the whole set, but the store happened to have Callidus Assassins (possibly just one), so that was what I snapped up, and it turned out they’re really good alongside basically any army. But next to my Ultra Marines (shut up it was my first army) nobody batted an eye. I literally never saw anybody take any other “Heroes of the Imperium” than Assassins though and yes, augmenting cheap shitty troops with Priests would absolutely be seen as “beardy”. You know, like what current Imperial Guard can just do within their Codex if they really want.

FrankT:

Practically speaking you were not going to get an Inquisitor. There were obscure Leadership stat related reasons you might want to, but the fundamental issue is that all characters of the multiple attacks and wounds type end up paying a big pile of points just for existing, so if you don't have a pretty good plan for them killing a big pile of dudes, it's pretty hard for these characters to justify their cost.

On the other hand, there were lots of good reasons to use Assassins (or at least, the Calidus or Vindicare Assassins), because they had clear means to recoup their points cost quickly. And more obscurely, every Imperial squad could have an attached Preacher character. Your basic priest was a cheap normal human with a laspistol, but he was technically a character so you could give him a Power Fist or a Storm Bolter. They don't wear armor, but due to obscurities involving wound allocations, that is often completely OK. Generally speaking, it was often useful to put priests into Guard squads as an additional source of firepower.



The bottom line though is that while there were a few reasons to use a few of the Heroes of the Imperium, you were pretty much asking for people to call you a cheese head for doing it. For fuck's sake, the troops aren't actually in your codex, they are in an appendix no one reads.

Koumei:

Later on, the shit-awful Inquisitor tabletop game briefly existed, and when that happened, we saw the Heroes of the Imperium simply get rolled in with other forces in the new codices of Codex: Daemon Hunters (which is about Grey Knights with a side order of Imperial Assassins and Ordo Malleus Inquisition) and Codex: Witch Hunters (which is about Battle Sisters with a side order of Imperial Assassins, Ordo Hereticus Inquisitors, and the assorted weird stuff of the Priesthood). The main thing I remember is that an Orbital Bombardment is not wargear you purchase for a character, it’s a unit (with no model other than the large blast template) that is a Heavy Support slot with a maximum of 1 per army. So in Apocalypse (which ignores both of those restrictions), you could basically field a hundred of those and just have a rain of fire every single turn. I don’t even know if it’s a good idea, but it’s funny, and also costs zero dollars. As long as someone on your side fields enough actual models to actually do things and not automatically lose the game, it could maybe work?

I digress. The things covered in the main book served as a reasonable baseline, but obviously things changed. Actual codices were usually better, and some forces were shuffled around (Heroes of the Imperium mostly), and Tau and Necrons started existing within this edition but not when it hit the shelves, so their books brought entirely new things to the table.

Let us now talk about some of the actual armies as presented in the book, starting with a minor sub-faction you might not have hear- I’m kidding.

Space Marines!


Featured on the cover of every edition of WH40K that has happened and will continue to be on the cover of every edition of WH40K in the future even after Games Workshop goes bankrupt and the IP is sold to an Icelandic videogame company.

FrankT:

Space Marines are the default army. They come in the box, they come in all the other promotional materials, they are easy to paint, they are cheap to collect, they are forgiving to model, and so on and such like. It's baby's first WH40K army, and by the way they are (in this edition) fucking powerful. Any and all 3rd edition army lists had to be asked the question “Can this army possibly beat a pile of Space Marines with default weaponry?” and if the answer was “No” then that army could “Fuck off.” You were going to play against Space Marines. A lot. And they were damn good.

The first thing about them is that they have just good stats pretty much across the board. They are strength 4, they are toughness 4, they have 3+ armor saves, their basic weapon is strength 4 too. Fuck, even their Initiative is 4, and that stat probably shouldn't even exist. The game tried to tell you that a normal stat was 3, but Space Marines had 4s across the board, which meant that all the other armies were just sub par in various ways. Orks have low BS and Strength. Eldar Warriors have low Strength and Toughness, actual human guardsmen are just generally shit. And so on.



But the really big fuck you to the rest of the game was “And They Shall Know No Fear.” That was a slogan back from the original Rogue Trader, and the authors liked it so much that they made it a broken special rule for Marine factions. Basically units in 3rd edition are called to make Leadership tests when they take a lot of casualties or get the bad end of close combat, and if they fail that test they break and there are various ways they can be wiped out. Failing that leadership test is bad. But with the Space Marine special rule, you don't get wiped out. You actually don't suffer any real penalties at all, and even get to shoot on your next turn in a lot of situations where you otherwise would not be allowed to do that. When Space Marines fail that test, it is good instead of bad. It's like playing on super easy mode, where you can get badly outflanked and get your heavy weapons team caught in a hammer and anvil by assault squads and just shrug because your opponent doesn't get to use the normal rules for wiping out squads.

Koumei:

Yeah, it’s not enough to just be Fearless (where you literally ignore the entire rules on Morale), Space Marines were allowed to run away but then just automatically regroup and act normally the following turn. And there are legitimate reasons why you might want your troops to run away for a very short moment. Your nine guys locked in combat with arbitrary orks, having lost one guy, would absolutely love to step back a few inches, then open fire and gun the orks down good and proper with actual ranged weapons, rather than sit in combat and slowly let iterative probability grind out a winner (still likely to be the Space Marines unless they managed to get a lot of orks in base contact).

And for a beginner army, you can sort of see why you might want them to have simplified Morale rules. Morale is important in the game (as it should be – imagine if some dickhead just changed it to “Whatever, I guess if you take casualties, check to see if you take some more”. That’d be a shitty fucking game not worth playing!), and also quite complex, doing a bunch of different things (Fear, Pinning, Morale from being shot to pieces, Morale from losing combat, Regrouping and its strict requirements…) But a better process might be to just select one or two aspects of it and say “This army is Immune to these parts of the Leadership rules, but not the others” or just cut a few restrictions on regrouping or something. Give actual baby steps there, rather than “for the most part you still have to know how you can be Pinned or Broken, but you can ignore what happens afterwards”.

Space Marine players are the worst players for a number of reasons. They want to have absolutely everyone else’s toys (and to a greater or lesser extent, they get them, sometimes actually stealing them and retro-actively making them Space Marine Only toys). They throw a hissy fit any time another army has something good. They expect to always win automatically. A large number of their players are actual children playing the game for the first time and so are annoying. Also they like to bellow (as best they can in their prepubescent voices) “FOR THE EMPEROR” a lot at the table, which is fucking annoying to people with sensitive ears.


Beethoven does not mind playing against Space Marines players.

FrankT:

You might think that a faction that had no weaknesses would be impossible to beat, but that wasn't strictly true. Space Marines weren't fantastically expensive, but they did cost more than anyone else's line troops. And there are definitely break points on the d6, so the fact that Space Marines were predictably good across the board meant that you could min/max your troop and weapon selections to trade well against Marines. And you fucking had to do this, because the chances of you playing against a faction that wasn't Marines was pretty small.

This was best shown in the Eldar Codex, where Gav Thorpe went ape shit writing up weapons that were perfectly optimized to cracking open Space Marines – which ironically made that force tragically incapable of fighting anything else. Yes, a Star Cannon will kill Orks or Guardsmen as easily as it will kill Marines – but that's exactly the point. Orks and Guard cost less points than Marines, so if you are killing “as many” of these guys as you'd be killing Marines, that is actually terrible.

Sisters of Battle


It comes last in the book, but you didn't actually expect us to save it for last did you?

Koumei:

Frank collected these before I even knew what 40K was. Sisters were actually my second army, when I returned from living interstate (the first time) and working with depression (the second time) and needed something to fill my time (always) and also had access to the poison that is 4chan’s /tg/.

If you want Sisters of Battle rule 34, they got your back.

At the start (and when the codex first dropped), there were two “typical” armies for Sisters of Battle. The first was to just put blobs of 20 Sisters and things like that, with masses of models everywhere. Lots of shooting, and lots of individual models to individually shoot (or wipe out in one go with a Battle Cannon). The second was to have three Exorcists (which were amazingly good) and a bunch of Seraphim squads and then a bunch of squads of Sisters in Rhinos. “Ideally” with a single Guard Platoon added so there are masses of cheap bodies to soak up fire. That second one may have actually been a “Codex” one and not a Grey Book one.

Later on after the codex, a joke army was introduced: the Lawn Chair Army. You take a Guard Platoon with a Sentinel patrol of 3x 3 Sentinels, you take 3 units of 3 Penitent Engines, and for the HQ you have Inquisitor Lord Fyodor Karamazov, so you have eighteen Walkers and one thing that looks like a Walker.

By the time later editions made tanks great again, it all changed, and it just became “Field as many Immolators as possible, and load them up with units that have 2-4 Meltas each”, with all your Troops actually being Storm Troopers or Inducted Guard. One guy had a kind of funny thing involving 2 Canonesses, 2 Command Squads with the expensive banner of “in close combat, every friendly unit in range counts as dealing 1 extra wound” and one or two Seraphim squads to leap in, then at the end of combat the enemy has taken 10-12 “extra” wounds to push their Leadership off the RNG and make them flee (or slaughter Fearless enemies, in the case of 5th Edition).

But that’s what it eventually became: gimmicks and “Everything except actual Sisters”.

FrankT:

Conceptually the Sisters of Battle in the Grey Codex are just what you get when you put Marine equipment on Human statlines and have a unit cost that comes in between those two. In 2nd edition, the Sisters of Battle were conceived as an allied force that you could stick into other Imperial armies – like the Heroes of the Imperium in 3rd edition. So the line wasn't particularly complete. There were 21 different models, but that's actually much less than it sounds. Recall these were metals, so every new pose was a whole new model. Eight of those models were just regular Sisters holding bolters at slightly different angles with or without helmets. Add some sculpts for unit leaders with various close combat weapon options and a couple of poses for jet pack troops and there was only room for one model with each heavy or special weapon option. And not very many of those. Your choices are Melta, Flamer, Multimelta, Heavy Flamer, and Heavy Bolter. That's seriously the whole list of non-Bolter gun options for the infantry.

So with that background, and the total lack of posable plastics or swappable weaponry, your units are pretty much just the same Sisters of Battle with the same weapon options in slightly different proportions. Retributors are the best because they have the most weapon upgrades, but the rest of the squads aren't really different. If for some reason you didn't pay any points for weapons upgrades, a Retributor Squad would be exactly the same as a regular line squad.


It should be noted that they also have the jet pack troops, and they look awesome.

With very little choice in troop or weapon selection, it would be easy for this army to be a train wreck. Many armies limited in such a way have historically been terrible. The Sisters were actually pretty OK for certain very limited ranges of points, simply because their weapon choices happen to cover everything you desperately want to do. Too many points and they run out of Retributor squads they are allowed to purchase and everything goes to shit.

Later on of course, the Salamanders would get special vehicles that were functionally immune to melta weapons, which was a hard counter to the entire army. And the expansion materials never really addressed these issues and it was all pretty odd. Instead we got randumb tables for prayer effects for your battle nuns.

Koumei:

There is also the Storm Bolter as a weapon option, but the fact that Frank forgot to mention it should serve as a hint as to how much you care. If you field models with Storm Bolters in your Sisters army, I can just about guarantee that the reason is “that’s the model I have”. And that’s a thing about metal armies of the time: your choices were to field what you got in the box, buy lots of individual blister packs, or get your saw out and do some conversion work. Also, the Storm Bolter was a weapon that unit leaders could take as well as being a Special Weapon for Dominion squads (the Fast Attack choice that has to take a Transport, and gets the Melta Gun and Flamer, whereas the Retributors get Heavy Flamers, Heavy Bolters and Multi Meltas). So you can generally make the Storm Bolter mini your Sister Superior for units rather than using up a position that could have a Melta or Flamer.

So, the reason why Sisters of Battle players are the worst should be obvious: they’re basically like me. Until we get a Codex that is on the scale of Space Marines (with different Orders getting different Heroines and special rules), with lots of options and good units in every slot, we will be unhappy and every official codex will be the actual worst codex ever, written by the worst writer ever. Until we get plastic kits for everything, the world is a shitty, miserable place. We are not going to accept any other army getting decent coverage for Flamers, Bolters and Meltas (like fucking Salamanders or Blood Angels) until we have something unique. We’re never happy with anything. A lot of us desperately want our army to be seen as the glorious righteous heroes whilst also being the militant arm of the major religion, and I’m just saying, historically that isn’t a combination you should expect to see.

Also a lot of them will also do the “FOR THE EMPEROR!” thing.

Imperial Guard

FrankT:

The Grey Codex Imperial Guard is actually quite powerful. When they made the Guard Codex the author basically apologizes for how overpowered these fuckers are and makes them cost a lot more points without being better. Most Codices are one flavor or another of power creep, but every so often you find some codex author who has a bug up their ass about how things are too powerful and writes a massive nerf codex to try to put things right. This can't ever work, because the other codex authors aren't on the same page and are just happily power creeping away. But before the Imperial Guard went on their unilateral disarmament campaign, they were pretty good.

Here's how it works: the Imperial Guard are slow as shit. They have the worst transport options in the game, none of their units have bikes or jet packs, and they are highly encouraged to put heavy weapons into almost every squad, which means they can't move at all. If you wanted a WWI simulator, here it fucking is. Further, they have shitty stat lines and bad basic equipment. But what they do have are two things:

• They are pretty cheap, just 5 points a model in the Grey Codex.
• They have access to the biggest guns in the game as vehicles and squad upgrades.

Imperial Guard spent their troop slots not on squads of infantry, but on platoons of infantry. Even their HQ was a mandatory command squad rather than a stand alone commander. A platoon was at least 25 dudes in 3 squads (and up to 55 dudes in six squads before taking optional extra dudes like priests and commisars). So the mandatory troop selections of the Imperial Guard were 55 models, which was already more models than most other entire armies. And that could cheaply be outfitted with 8 Lascannons and 4 Plasma Guns, which is kind of a lot for the basic troop picks of an army, and really a lot considering that you got 50 dudes your opponent had to chop through and the whole fucking thing only cost you 400 points.

And then on the other end you had slow as shit tanks with ginormous weapons that blew the everliving shit out of things under 5” templates. And some of those had nearly impervious front armor. It was good times.

Now was it possible to beat the Guard? Absolutely. But a lot of armies people actually ran couldn't do it. If you tweaked all your weapon choices to fight marines (which you probably did), you could easily end up just not having enough bullets for all the Guardsmen on the other end of the table.


You see, killbots have a preset kill limit. Knowing their weakness, I sent wave after wave of my own men at them until they reached their limit and shut down.

Koumei:

These days it is possible to field legitimate armies of nothing but Main Battle Tanks (and a handful of Tech Priests), but back then, that was not possible. Indeed, you were considered a dirty cheater if you took a pair of minimum Troops choices, a Company Command Squad and then as many as THREE tanks. Slow down there, three whole tanks? You can fuck off, what do you think this is, a military endeavour? I mean, I’m pretty sure there are people living in America who have never served in the military yet own more than three tanks just for their own shits and giggles. As the game progressed, they added options for taking smaller numbers of infantry (even if they were more elite and thus had a similar final cost in points, you were essentially buying and painting the same type of model, so it saved you dollars), and larger numbers of tanks, and if you did that you were PLAYING THE GAME WRONG!

Meanwhile, half the time it was actually more effective to slam a hundred models onto the table and go “Oh, I guess I’ll have to put the rest in Reserves.” back then. It only became a problem for objective-scrambling, and against enemies with big blast weapons (which gradually increased until that was most armies), or missions against fast-running melee forces when you have a lot of intervening cover or night-fighting rules or something else that just shuts the entire army down. But seriously, in the early days, you were often better off fielding a swarm of doods, and that was seen as the less beardy thing, which D&D players should understand just fine when it comes to justifying two prestige classes on a fighter but Clerics working just fine.

FrankT:

The supremacy of Guard did not last very long, and they went from “dominant” to “bad” to “essentially unplayable” in not very long. The most obvious difficulty was changing the cost of a basic troop from 5 points to 6 and changing the cost of Lascannons from 15 points to fucking thirty. But the real kick in the nuts was the gradual change from a default mission of “kill the other dudes” to a default mission of “put a squad onto each of the objectives.” That pushed the game from one where you could have your entire army sit back and shoot heavy weapons and say “come at me bro” to one where you were required to have some non-zero number of squads on jetbikes or packed into fast transports or something so that you could plausibly contest objectives near the enemy deployment zone. The Guard did not have that and had no real way to get that.

Koumei:

Imperial Guard players are the worst players because when they put men on the table or move them, it takes hours. Also, they tend to do the “FOR THE EMPEROR” thing plenty. But they’ll also shout other stuff, generally taken from a dozen different generals and tacticians who had wildly incompatible styles – so expect “Plenty more where that came from, send the next wave! Drown them in your corpses!” right next to a line about the enemies’ numbers counting for nothing. They like to think of themselves as great generals and historians who have read up on the art of war (I mean, "I have read The Art of War during my Three Kingdoms obsession period", but that doesn’t magically make you a good tactician), and will (unsuccessfully) try to coordinate the entire side in a multi-player game like Apocalypse, where any failing is obviously because the other generals didn’t listen to their amazing advice.

FrankT:

Next Up: Non-Imperial armies.

Koumei:

Don’t worry, they also have the worst players!

[Thaluikhain]

I like metal sisters. Ok, I have enough metal guard for an army or two, and I bought them after plastic guard came out, so that might just be me.

I also don't see what's wrong with chimeras (compared to a rhino, razorback or immolator), excepting that you'd likely have something from the IG codex in them, instead of something with bolters and power armour.

[Username17]

Functionally with a Chimera you are paying more points to have a BS 3 multilaser on the front. That is terrible.

[Nath]

Space Marines!


Featured on the cover of every edition of WH40K that has happened and will continue to be on the cover of every edition of WH40K in the future even after Games Workshop goes bankrupt and the IP is sold to an Icelandic videogame company.

Funnily enough, the Crimson Fists chapter to which the space marines on this famous picture belong to never received any coverage save a White Dwarf article in the early 2000s, before the Fifth Edition in 2008 granted them the immense privilege of exactly one special character.

[souran]

Featured on the cover of every edition of WH40K that has happened and will continue to be on the cover of every edition of WH40K in the future even after Games Workshop goes bankrupt and the IP is sold to an Icelandic videogame company.Funnily enough, the Crimson Fists chapter to which the space marines on this famous picture belong to never received any coverage save a White Dwarf article in the early 2000s, before the Fifth Edition in 2008 granted them the immense privilege of exactly one special character.

Actually the Crismson Firsts got a special character in the 3rd edition space marine codex. Look it up, "Captain Cortez". 3rd Edition was the edition that created all the fapping to Rogal Dorn that exists at places like 1d4chan. And the crimson fists are a Dorn chapter. 3rd Edition heavily featured the Black Templars (not a bad choice white/black looks really striking on the table top) and they are a Dorn chapter as well. Later editions went back to making ridiculous and fan displeasing statements about how cool blue space marines were. This was dumb. Especially because in 3rd and 4th edition, before they decided to tell people that all space marines who were not blue were bad at being space marines, they made the blue marines interesting by letting them be roman legionaries in space instead of monastic knights in space.

The imperial armies actually create a pretty decent cross section of forces.

Space Marines are a stock standard quality over quanty army. Frank and Koumei didn't mention that most Space Marine "specialist" troops are just regular space marines with equipment slightly better suited for their supposed role and space marine elite troops are basically just units made up of space marine sargents (i.e. regular troops with 2 base attacks).

The real issue with the space marines is that they are massively over exposed. They form the core of the IP and so are part of everything. A quality of quantity army is ALREADY attractive in a miniatures game because they are less expensive (unless you decide to price things in accordance with their point cost instead of their materials cost). So if you make the games quality over quantity army the symbol of the fucking game what you really do is just make the Quality army the standard and everybody else is just crappier than normal in various ways.

The games rules are theoretically devised with the IG as the "sample/typical" force but that's obviously bullshit.

Also, while the sisters are an army the many players are personally attached to they are always one of the last updated forces because I get the feeling that most of GW doesn't really like them. Sisters could be folded into the guard, or just dubbed a special subset of marines and it would probably be better for the game.

[souran]

Functionally with a Chimera you are paying more points to have a BS 3 multilaser on the front. That is terrible.

The reason to have a chimera is so that you don't have to have 2 platoons as troops. A single squad with a chimera counts as a troops choice. To make your army legal you have one infantry platoon with the minimum number of squads (3 - command and two 10 man sections) and then a unit of 10 guard in a chimera and that is the cheapest possible way to get the force org chart to legal status.

Besides, as you yourself noted the guard need transports if they want to have any chance of getting scoring units on top of objectives. Fuck their weaponry, they are basically mobile terrain that can move your guys around.

[Username17]

OSSR: WH40K: 3rd Edition
Non-Imperial Armies


Oh shit! They let the Aliens in!

Koumei:

Not just aliens, but also all of the Chaos army. Singular. Anyway, here we’re going over everything that isn’t in the Imperium, which all matter to the story. To greater or lesser extents. For most of them, it’s lesser, despite any threat to the universe they might theoretically pose. Because the meta-plot for the next forever is still going to basically be about that one time some dude stabbed some other dude and then died and then the dude who was stabbed had to go sit down and everyone is still angry about it.


Pictured: all of their combined interest in Orks, Eldar, Necrons, Tyranids and Tau

FrankT:

Being non-Imperial doesn't make you any more good or evil. It doesn't make you better or worse at justifying alliances with other factions. It just means that you can't use Heroes of the Imperium as additional units. Some of the non-Imperial factions don't particularly feel different from some of the Imperial factions. Indeed, Chaos Marines are pretty much exactly Marines with slightly different squad upgrade options.

Eldar


Pretty much this.

Koumei:

If you want to paint your army up like a gay pride parade, and believe me I understand if you do, then Eldar are probably the army where you can “get away with it” the most. People just give them a free pass on having a wild clash of colours and indeed having bright colours at all. Whereas Fantasy Battle lets you choose between two types of elves that could arguably use bright colours (High and Wood), along with Lizardmen, this is the grim darkness of the far future, so you need to be sparing with your neons and pastels. Anyway, these are elves. But in space. Specifically they are the High elves in space, except they worship Khaine the Bloody-Handed (more on him later!) whereas in Fantasy Battle it’s the Night elves that have a Khainite faction. Don’t worry, there is an army that is “Night Elves (in space)”, and you already know that’s the Dark Eldar. The Dark Eldar do not talk about standard Eldar gods. Or any of them actually.

FrankT:

The Eldar are space elves. Since they are based on the elves in Warhammer Fantasy and the Warhammer Fantasy elves are based on racially insensitive caricatures of Irish people, there is some stuff about Eldar that is kind of dickish. Since most of the readership doesn't live in the United Kingdom and isn't familiar with hurtful Irish stereotypes from British people, this facet of the Eldar backstory is largely lost on people. And that's a good thing. Suffice to say, there are a bunch of jokes in the Eldar backstory that a non-British person will not get, and doing enough research into the matter such that you understand the jokes will just make you offended and still won't be funny. So we'll mostly ignore that aspect and move the fuck along.


The British have a deep well of hurtful and insane things to say about Irish people. You have no idea and should probably keep it that way.

The Eldar army is composed of bizarre and elite specialist troops. It's sort of weirdly Aztec, with special warrior orders that have animal themes and distinctive outfits and bright colors and shit. The origin of Eldar warrior orders seems to have been ADHD – authors and sculptors would just jump from one thing to another thing and make weird ass shit. So they were like bored of dudes with one sort of hat and weapon ensemble and then they just made some other thing entirely.

The other thing to understand is that the Eldar were designed by undisguised powergamers, which means that most of the specialist troops or equipment were designed to be overpowered. But here's the thing about that: those were designed to be overpowered by people who were math-phobic and a lot of the options were not actually overpowered. And beyond that, they were designed to be overpowered in a completely different ruleset. Most of the flavors of aspect warrior were made up in the run-up to 2nd edition, which had rules that worked completely differently – so all the weird shit that Jes Goodwin designed to be secretly overpowered was secretly overpowered in an edition that didn't actually exist. Rogue Trader was a thing in 1987, and 2nd edition WH40K was a thing in 1993, but the Craftworld Eldar as we know them today came out in 1993 – and were designed in 1991 for the game the Nottingham boys were playing at the time, which was a weird in-between system which was based on 1st edition but modified by 48 months of White Dwarf articles and supplemental rules and experimental things they were doing in-house and not publishing yet and shit. So really the various warrior types of the Eldar exist to make Jes Goodwin win at a game that mostly existed in Jes Goodwin's head.

Flashforward to 3rd edition and models have been locked in since the Bush Senior administration and a lot of the equipment assignments no longer make any sense. Swooping Hawks have flight packs and weak but long range weapons because you used to just play until someone routed the other side and it was thus possible to kite some enemies by flying away and grinding them down for 20 turns. 3rd edition has a fucking turn limit and Swooping Hawks are a god damn joke.


This model is obviously fucking useless in 3rd edition – the gun only good for staying back and shooting enemies trying to get into your area and the the wings only good for trying to move forward into your opponent's area. But it already existed, so it gets converted stats in the Grey Codex of 3rd edition. Terrible, terrible stats.

When the Eldar Codex came out for 3rd edition the following year, someone (Gav Thorpe) remembered what Eldar were all about and made weird ass special rules for all their squads and special Eldar-only modifiers to all their equipment and made them super optimized for fighting Marine armies. But when 3rd edition came out, Eldar forces were pretty much exactly what you'd expect for an army that was min/maxed for an edition you were not playing – weirdly deficient in many key areas and with the ability to buy shockingly large numbers of specific weapons systems you didn't even want.

Koumei:

Admittedly, the bit where you didn’t buy “a tactical squad with a missile launcher and a flamer” but instead bought “a flamer squad” and “a missile launcher squad” and so on made sense. In fact, Eldar and Orks seemed to be the only armies that understood how the rules worked, that mixed weapons are a waste when everyone has to shoot at the same thing. This would remain the case all the way up until 8th Edition, which is a car fire in its own special ways, but for any squad that you actually wanted to take in the first place (for instance, Fire Dragons, Dark Reapers, and not Swooping Hawks), being able to simply add “more of the thing that is useful to this” as opposed to an extra five Bolter Bitches in a Retributor squad was an attractive choice. Even the fucking psykers could be taken as a squad (at least, the B-grade ones – the S-Plus-grade ones are a single model as an army leader).


If these were an Imperial faction, you actually would be putting them together like this. But these are Eldar, so apart from the Army Leader at the back, each of those models actually comes in a squad of up to ten of that guy with the same equipment, swapping *one* out for “that guy but with better versions of the same equipment and better stats and a special rule that boosts the entire unit”.

We covered this before, but actual main battle tanks were kind of shitty. But you definitely wanted the ability to destroy them when you did face them – a Basilisk can only do one thing but that one thing happens to be dropping a large blast of “Instant Death to most infantry, ignores armour short of a Terminator” out to ten feet away, and ignoring the whole Line of Sight rules, and having to sit still isn’t a big deal in that kind of situation. You are not playing on a table that is ten feet long: if you aren’t in close combat range or off the table in Reserves, you are in its firing zone. Similarly, plenty of people (especially over time as Objective-Grabbing became the thing) liked to zoom about in cheap transports, and you want to blow them up very early. Introducing the Fire Dragon.

Equipment: Melta Gun
Training: Melta Gun
Tactics: Melta Gun

So basically, you have a 250 point Land Raider on the table for some reason, and then a Wave Serpent zooms all the way up to it and some guys roll out. The Land Raider explodes, a couple of the dragons die in the explosion, and the Autarch calls it a good trade, all the while the Terminators clamber out of the flaming wreckage and look at their target on the other side of the battlefield, thinking about how they could have chosen to teleport.

If some shrieking bell-end is still going on about how Melta Guns are over powered and broken, they’re thinking about how Fire Dragons annihilated vehicles (mainly transports) in 3rd Edition. And in 4th Edition. And then in Tank Edition, they destroyed all of those too. Like a lot of things, the problem is really “Eldar” and even then it’s specific to particular editions and scenarios. But yes, before 6th Edition, if you wanted a good unit for Eldar, the answer was “Fire Dragons”. Typically you only really needed two or three units of them, so you didn’t even have to take a special Craftworld that made them Troops choices for you.

FrankT:

3rd Edition has often been accused of being “transport edition” because, well, it's basically Transport Edition. Being in Transports and shooting out port holes is one of the most effective things high-quality infantry can do, and getting shuttled to the other side of the battlefield in a transport is one of the only ways you can actually get anywhere in the kind of turn limited games that 3rd edition was built around. So while in previous editions troop transports were basically a joke, in 3rd edition they suddenly became really important.

This kicked the Eldar in the nuts in two ways. The first is that Transports allowed half of the models to shoot out the sides at any given time and Eldar Aspect Warriors were all armed the same way – which meant that while Marines were letting the heavy weapons guys shoot out the sides while bolter armed bullet catchers sat around in the back of the bus, the Eldar were suddenly being asked to sideline expensive dudes with missile launchers and shit under the new rules. But the bigger problem was that the main Eldar transport (the Wave Serpent) did not have a model. Like, at all. In the previous 7 years of Eldar being Aspect Warriors and shit, no one had really asked for a Wave Serpent model except a couple of completionism fetishists and Games Workshop never bothered. As it happens, there wasn't a Wave Serpent kit made by Games Workshop that you could actually buy in stores for the entire life of 3rd edition. People who needed them for various reasons either proxied or converted. It was sad times for space elves all around.


This is a top notch conversion job making a Wave Serpent out of a Falcon Grav Tank. Well done.

Koumei:

I couldn’t tell you the difference, visually, between a Wave Serpent, Falcon, and Fire Prism without looking it up, so you might be in luck in regards to conversions if other players are as forgetful.


Pictured: all three of the above. When they’re next to each other like that I can tell them apart.

But it was a bit of a problem, as was the fact that they didn’t have any Dark Eldar transports – something GW has strived to keep true to this day.

I was about to type “fuck dark eldar” into google image search to see if there was a picture that perfectly encapsulated GW’s feelings on the matter. Then I realised what a terrible idea that would be.

Anyway, you weren’t limited to just non-existent Wave Serpents, jump troops you didn’t take, and Orange Power Rangers. You also had Green Power Rangers that were kind of okay for close combat sort of, Black Power Rangers that had AP 3 missile launchers, White Power Rangers that die before they can reach you in close combat, and ghosts. And jetbikes which would be getting a lot more popular as the game focused on snatching objectives in the later turns. Along with some of the best (at the time) and most reliable Psykers, and a giant ghost monster that kicks face in close combat and back in the day was actually decent at surviving that trek – it was more a matter of the game running out of turns than it running out of Wounds. Seriously, the Wraithlord had good enough stats that you had to use your stronger weapons against it, as opposed to it just being a good idea. They also had really cheap sniper units as Troops, which is a thing you could do to fill some points but nothing to be excited about, and Dire Avengers, which were very average until the codex gave them the ability to double-tap and just shoot the absolute shit out of you when they really needed to.

Oh and they also had Guardians.

FrankT:

Yes. Eldar also had Guardians. How could I forget?

One of the big things about Eldar is that they are all worshipers of the Chaos god of bloody battle: Khorne. But see, they are aliens, so they say it kind of differently. They call him Khaine. And their big daemon is called an Avatar and instead of having it possess one of their great champions and hulking out into a giant iron skinned war god with the mark of Khorne on its face and perpetually dripping blood from its hands... they um... have their big daemon possess one of their great champions and have it hulk out into a giant iron skinned war god with the mark of Khorne on its face and perpetual blood dripping from its hands. It's not particularly subtle.


Its head is literally the mark of Khorne!

But here's the thing about Shroedinger's Canon: it doesn't matter how fucking obvious you make a “secret,” if you don't spell out the resolution of the mystery in giant letters (and sometimes even if you do), some people just aren't going to figure it out. And some of those people are going to be writing for your product. So it should come as no surprise to you that the fact that the Eldar are all secretly chaos worshipers is something that is extremely obvious yet at the same time vehemently denied by many fans and contradicted by various official fluff pieces here and there.

Koumei:

Which actually brings us to “why Eldar fans are the worst people”. And that right there is basically one of them. They refuse to acknowledge this because that means one of their biggest gods is just an aspect of a “human” Chaos god and therefore they’re not the number one important race. They buy into the cultural supremacy of the Eldar and really want to talk about how Eldar are the good guys (they are not). They also talk up the galactic importance of what is a dying race – the most important things the Eldar did were “give birth to the Chaos god Slaanesh. Well done, dickheads” and “Create the webway, which is barely a footnote except for certain events involving the Emperor and Magnus and daemonic incursions”. They also have a weird idol worship of their spiritual liege Gav Thorpe, and I’m pretty sure every single one will tell you at least twice about the super elegant game design decisions such as how it is a truth that no army should be building its forces out of things its own guns are best at wrecking (specifically, they have Lance weapons which treat vehicle AV over 12 as just 12, and the maximum AV of their vehicles is 12, not from some great insight but because elves obviously use flimsy lightweight materials).

They get a lot of flak currently for playing the beardy army of power gamers, but that is a thing that waxes and wanes and unless they bought their entire army after seeing the 6th or 7th Edition Codex, they probably had to play through bad times just like nearly everyone else.

Dark Eldar


Someone ordered a claw gauntlet with a aisde of boob.

FrankT:

The Dark Eldar are a thing that sort of obviously existed for over a decade before they actually existed. Warhammer Fantasy had Night Elves (now called Dark Elves), so it was natural to assume that if there were space elves that there would be space dark elves somewhere in the mix. Various references were made in various pieces of fluff because fucking obviously, but they weren't an actual thing with models you could buy and paint until 3rd edition. In the original Rogue Trader there were space elves who were pirates, and those guys were sort of Dark Elfish, but it was 3rd edition where they actually sat down and made a real set of Dark Eldar models and army lists and shit.


That's not a belt buckle. It's a codpiece. The Dark Eldar really love their codpieces.

The Dark Eldar are like regular Eldar but darker and crueler and shit. Since the regular Eldar already sacrifice people to summon daemons and kill whole planets worth of people and otherwise do all the dickish evil shit that all the factions in 40K get up to – there isn't a lot of ways for the Dark Eldar to be any Darker than the regular Eldar already are. So there's a little bit of fluff here and there about how edge lordy they are and all their violent sexual perversions and shit. But none of that makes it to the 3rd edition basic book, because this is a family game so we can talk blithely about mass murder but can't even imply that somebody might have a working penis or vagina hidden away somewhere. To be honest, 40K fluff in general overuses grimdark imagery and superlatives that the “darkness” of the Dark Eldar never really came across. They pretty much seemed exactly the same as the rest of the Eldar except they had more fun while slaughtering people.

But for all the Dark Eldar were kind of flimsy conceptually, they at least tried to do some interesting stuff mechanically. As a new army in 3rd edition and the example army in the box other than space marines, they tried to give them stuff that did things that filled niches that the new rules created. Some of those things were pretty neato. Like, you get flying open-topped transports, which regular Eldar would give their remaining testicle for. Open topped transports are ones where the whole squad can fire out instead of half the squad, which would be really useful for the kinds of single-armament squads that the Dark Eldar don't have but which the regular Eldar totally do.

You also get great moments of self refutation like jet pack models with heavy weapons that they can only fire if they don't move. I don't know what that was supposed to be for, and no one else did either.

Koumei:

So yes, Dark Eldar were weird, and not just in their helmets, codpieces and sexual proclivities. Starting with I want to say fourth edition, almost all Infantry could Run instead of shooting, adding an amazing 1d6 inches to their movement, but leaving them unable to Assault afterwards. When 3rd Edition first hit the shelves, Dark Eldar had that as an ability and that was theirs alone. It wasn’t amazing, but it was useful, and the whole idea of heavy weapons on jump packs was probably that on the first turn, and any turn where you ran out of targets in range, you moved 1d6+12 inches (which is pretty tasty, and a close range unit would love that), sacrificing a turn of shooting that you couldn’t make yet in exchange for being in a more target-rich environment on the next few turns. Or you could give them all Dark Lances and ask yourself why you ever need to move when you deploy them close to the middle of the table. Or you don’t take them because Heavy slots are for Ravagers. I already mentioned their problem with having one basic list that you had to adhere to.


This is the dark lance. Your army lives and dies based on how many of these you can shoot at viable targets per turn.

For the record, even in seventh Edition, Eldar would have killed to be able to use Raiders and Venoms, and you could sort of make Wyches useful-ish by allying them with Eldar, and matching your units with characters such that every “Wych Cult” thing was paired with something that had a Banshee mask and they were all in Raiders and thus zoomed across the field, rolled out of the flaming wreckage and then denied the enemy Overwatch as they got their combat on. That is not something you can actually do because they just straight-up wrote a “No, fuck you” rule. And then when they made a special combined Eldar and Dark Eldar army, they still put the “No, fuck you” rule in it. This did not mean that people took those two armies separately or just took Dark Eldar without Craftworld Eldar (except for one guy who did amazing things with Reaver Jetbikes), what it meant for the most part was they just took armies of Craftworld Eldar with more of “the stuff that is really strong right now”.

FrankT:

The Dark Eldar were extremely experimental, and lots of the experiments didn't work out. Functionally that meant that right in the Grey Codex there were a bunch of squads and vehicles and shit that were listed that you would never dream of actually fielding because they were horrible. But also because they tactically had no reason to exist – like your aforementioned Scourges who can move really far or shoot big guns when they don't move but obviously not both of those things at the same time.


You're paying points for capabilities you will not use.

But importantly for a new army, you had enough units you wanted to field an army. You had a squad of Incubi in a transport and you had a bunch of regular warriors with some dark lances and splinter cannons. And of course you had some flying ships that were made out of paper mache but were fast and had a decent gun on the front. There wasn't a lot of variation in Dark Eldar armies that weren't terrible, and you ran out of points to spend on things pretty fast. But for 1000 to 1500 point games they were decent enough.

Dark Eldar got one of the earliest Codex books dedicated to them and this gave them a tiny bit of extra playable stuff. But then... that was it. Games Workshop just sort of lost interest in supporting the army, and they didn't get a new Codex until 5th edition... in 2010. All they got in the intervening twelve actual years was a 4th edition “revised edition” of their 3rd edition Codex in 2003. This was mostly just a reprinting of the 3rd edition codex. It was... incompletely converted to 4th edition and in no way updated for all the power creep shit that had happened to other factions (mostly Marines) in the preceding half decade.

So Dark Eldar players had a reason to be salty. They were promised a big new exciting army and GW really seemed like it was delivering on that... for a few months. Then they got distracted by like a squirrel or some fucking thing and forgot to update the army again for eleven actual years.


Games Workshop was about to design some Dark Eldar fast attack troop selections.

Koumei:

Technically, that’s not quite all they got: Forgeworld gave them the Raven, a very lightly armoured Flyer that had a Twin Dark Lance and a Long-Range Splinter Cannon, and used a Fast Attack slot, so while it cost a lot of points (and a lot of pounds!), you could argue that it’s the best you could do with a Fast Attack slot so if you still had points to spend then you had nothing better to do.


Like being the only male in Harvest Moon, it gets chosen by dint of being the only thing fit for purpose in the area.

Something (possibly Forgeworld, possibly White Dwarf) added the Razorwing, which was sort of like two Ravems glued together (and basically was just a conversion using two Ravens) but was not worth the cost at all and I doubt anyone ever took one.

That is all that Forgeworld gave them until their 5th Edition Codex.

Now, Dark Eldar fans are the worst players because there tend to be two types:
A) “I split a starter set and got the Not-Space-Marines, so that’s what I have”. Which means they’re incredibly bitter about the whole experience and the years and years of neglect. I’m not saying it’s their fault, but it doesn’t make for fun company. For bonus points, let them sit next to Sisters fans and they can both mope together and argue about who is more neglected. Now, they’re not necessarily the younger sibling of the person who bought the starter set, though that literally describes my younger sister, you could get some people who wanted Corsairs. They can’t have Corsairs, however, so what they do is sort of model their Dark Eldar as Corsairs and pretend they’re fielding Corsairs. But they’re not actually fielding Corsairs and they know it, and they hate that.


Pictured: what they wanted. Not pictured: what they got.

B) “Okay, time to be Grim Dark. Wait, the entirety of humanity combines the worst elements of the Catholic church and the Nazi party and tortures itself and genocides its own people in the face of what you’d think would be bigger outside threats? Well, time to OUTDO THEM!”

As a side-effect of the weird torture-and-gore obsession of the army, you see the players wanting to out-edgelord everyone and out-grimdark everyone. You think 40K is grim and dark? The Dark Eldar are MORE grim and dark. DARK is right there in the name! Most people try to apologise for things or justify why their force are the heroes? These guys straight up adopt the mantle of The Villain.


Sure, why not?

Anyway, they will boast about how evil their faction is, even though they’re too minor a faction to actually have much effect on the setting. They might be shittier people than the high-ups of the Imperium (and I stress the word might there), but they can’t hope to have the same total suffering caused because they just don’t have the manpower. It’s like claiming Joeseph Fritzl caused more harm than the Republican Party: he didn’t, he’s not even in their ball park, he’s just a lot creepier.

Orks


There is a distinctive and dangerous lack of flame throwing guitars in the Ork army list.

FrankT:

Orks speak with a Scouse accent, which means that all the “jokes” in the game about Ork speech patterns are really people in Nottingham making fun of working class people from the Northwest of England. Good times! But again, if you aren't English, you won't really notice the insulting classist behavior and you'll instead just see a bunch of weak jokes and bad puns that are a bit hard to read.

Anyway, Orks are concepted as being a never ending green tide of aggression, but that doesn't really work out in practice. The first thing is that Orks Boyz are not in fact the cheapest regular dudes in the galaxy – that's Imperial Guard. And the second is that waddling into close combat on foot in 3rd edition is a fuckin death sentence. It's 3 turns until you can get into combat that way, and you aren't going to survive. If you don't have jump packs or a transport or something, you are not getting into close combat in a reasonable amount of time and this is not a reasonable life strategy. And the third is that, well, Orks aren't actually that good in close combat in the first place. They have the kinds of weapon skills and toughness that a Marine would be expected to have, but they lack the strength or armor save. All in all, the standard Ork “green tide” strategy involves you slowly crawling across the battlefield while people shoot you to ribbons and then in the latter half of the game you finally get into close combat and the few remaining Orks get mopped up with chainswords.


Honestly, this whole army is pretty stupid.

So if you do things the way you're “supposed to” in the Grey Codex, you just get your green head kicked in. Also any other head you happen to have. To do anything vaguely viable with this stuff, you have to get fancy with the specialist troops. Which automatically makes you an insufficiently Orky git or something, but at least it doesn't make you automatically lose the fucking game.

Orks in the Grey Codex are blessed with some pretty great special weapons squads and even greater equipment. The big downside is that it all has stupid names. So you get like Burna Boyz with flame throwers that also act as power weapons and Rokkit Boyz with move-and-fire heavy weapons and it's all pretty great. Except that unfortunately you still have to put it on Orks, who have shitty accuracy and worse armor.

But with enough trucks and special weapons teams, you can win. Especially if your opponent paid extra points to get weapons that were good at penetrating armor. Because then you can do that thing that Guard do where your troops don't actually cost enough to be worth shooting expensive armor piercing star lasers at. Fooled em!

Koumei:

Having done some research (ie checking a couple of youtube clips, one of which is Jimmy Carr doing his regional accents), I’m not so sure they’re Scousers. Honestly, it seems like they rolled Mancs and Cockneys together, which is not a gentle roll. If we go based on some grouping other than geographic location, it’s simply football hooligans (a subtype of the “yob” category).

Anyway, their special weapons tend to be really cheap and/or twin-linked to make up for the terrible accuracy, and when these are exploited, you can do okay by focusing on having lots of cheap, powerful weapons (that, if twin-linked, are more accurate than a non-twinned Imperial Guard gun). Other than that, Orks sort of play a weird Rock-Paper-Scissors with other armies:

You don’t send your rank-and-file (Ork Boyz) against other Rank and File (Tactical Squads). Because that would not go in your favour, probably even if fighting two-to-one. What you instead do is throw them against shitty Imperial Guard (ideally their Heavy Weapon teams, which tie a bunch of points into three models that can barely fight in close quarters) and similar things. Even weapon emplacements are fair game. A squad of 30 that sneaks through terrain can also serve as a basic tarpit – a Devastator squad is not a great thing, but if the enemy does have one, you can lock up with them in close combat and inform them that shooting will not be happening for the rest of the game. Against a hero, you can save your actual heroes and things from slaughter by sacrificing a thirty-man squad. You’ll lose but you can at least tie them up for a bit.

Your elite Nobz are not Terminator equivalents. Instead, you use them to bust cheap transport vehicles, and maybe to fight regular Space Marine squads if you kit them out with the right wargear.

You don’t pit tanks against tanks. You pit tank bustaz against them.

And so on and so forth. Orks cannot fight on an even footing, and so they must not do so. Any Ork captain that actually wins does so by being as cunning as Mork (or possibly Gork) and essentially not fighting like an Ork is “supposed” to.

Various editions and codices have tried to help Orks be completely playable, but in a hap-hazard manner, and typically by just giving them more really strong really cheap firepower. Anything that helps them be great in close combat tends to be stifled by actual rule edition changes that makes charging into combat even more of a loser’s game, and only enhanced by local stores that set up “a maze of walls” for their terrain, which blocks Line of Sight but doesn’t even count as Difficult Terrain, you can just phase through the walls completely, yes I’m talking to you, Marion fucking shopping centre.

FrankT:

With an army that runs almost entirely out of the limited slots, it should come as no surprise that Orks become pretty awful when the points totals increase. You just can't field that many Zapp Gunz or whatever, because you only get 3 Heavy Support picks.

Koumei:

I’ve been waiting for this. Ork players are the worst because they are just a pain in the ass. It’s not only how they talk about the cosmic importance of their race and how they reproduce infinitely (nothing actually says that in the books, they just start off with a huge spore eruption and “Orks out of nowhere”) and thus will eventually conquer every single planet (despite all evidence to the contrary). Their battle-cries at the table are the actual worst, in a game that also has Imperial and Khornate shouting. With those two simply existing at all, you should not be hitting the top two, but to overtake them means you are a terrible person who needs to be locked in a small room until you learn appropriate acceptable behaviour. Oh also they like to talk like Orks at the table, non-stop, and while I would hope that they don’t do this in Britain where it’s more likely to offend, I would absolutely bet money that they still do it there.

FrankT:

You would win that bet.


No looting today Jeeves, it simply would not do.

Chaos


Basically this.

FrankT:

Chaos in Warhammer is basically Chaos from Stormbringer, right down to having swiped the eight arrow symbol of Chaos Undivided. But because it's Warhammer and therefore the grim derp is turned up to 11, the grimderp is turned up to eleven! We got skulls and shit! The Imperium is specifically a cacocracy that runs on human sacrifice, but Chaos is the bad guys because they um... like do moar human sacrifice. Or something. They spend a lot of time wearing human skins and making piles of skulls and shit. Chaos spends a lot of time shouting “Skulls for the skull throne!” and similar aphorisms.


“Skulls for the skull throne!” is the actual battle cry of real world Kali worshipers in South Asia, but I suspect that the folks at Games Workshop were unaware of this fact and made that battle cry independently.

There are lots of flavors of Chaos, and you don't particularly care. What you get in the Grey Codex is some Chaos Marines and you can supplement them with a few packs of summonable daemons. It's the kind of thing that sounds like a strict upgrade to regular Marines, in that you can field an entire army of Marines but you can also buy some daemons if you want. What's not to like? Well, regular loyalist Marines have the morale ignoring special rule “And They Shall Know No Fear” and Chaos Traitor Legions... don't. They just don't have that rule at all. A bunch of their elites are actually fearless and don't make morale checks, but those dudes are expensive. The regular troops have to make regular morale checks and when they fail they start booking it like they were common Dark Eldar or Imperial Guard. The problem being that they are still pretty expensive individually so they don't come in big squads and it's pretty easy to force them to make morale checks.


This guy is basically pissing himself right now.

So functionally the Chaos Marines armylist from the Grey Codex was mostly just slightly worse regular Marines in exchange for being allowed to buy some extra expensive options that you mostly didn't want.

Koumei:

Yeah, nobody cared about generic Lesser Daemon units. I assume people sometimes wanted Greater Daemons for their HQ choices, but even then you might want “a cheap guy” to lead it so you can take more… Combi-Weapon Terminators? I don’t even know what they really wanted when it came to Grey Codex. What they actually wanted was a real codex – as did everyone – and when it came, it was so good for them that to this day Chaos players use it as a measuring stick for any new codex. The closest anyone has ever come was the assorted “Not exactly a codex, more a collection of five or six books” GW vomited up at the end of 7th Edition, and fuck you if you are going to a tournament that specifies “You can use a single book besides the main rulebook”.

I could take a moment to explain why they liked the 3Ed codex so much, but that’s not really relevant to what is (and indeed isn’t) in the Grey book. Suffice to say, it not only gives a bunch of options for each slot and makes a lot (not all) of those options attractive, it gives you options within the units (like basic Marines choosing between Boltgun or Bolt Pistol and Chainsword on a model by model basis) and army-wide choices like “I’m playing Iron Warriors. I get 4 Heavy Support choices and access to some Imperial Guard tanks, but I only have one Fast Attack choice”.

Weirdly enough, the army of people who broke away from the restrictions of the Imperium to go do their own thing don’t actually have an array of unique weapons. Certain Chaos Gods bless their devotees with special things like AP 3 (“ignores Power Armour”) Boltguns or Sonic Weapons or Chain-Axes, but there is no plain-old “Warpfire Cannon” or “Ionic Pulse Rifle” or whatever else you think would be reasonable for them to make. That takes several editions and help from Forgeworld to happen, and even then they’re still using Twin-Linked Boltguns instead of the more modern (and not actually superior) Storm Bolters, and have elected not to use Ass Cannons. I get that they can’t literally be “Regular Space Marines, plus more customisation and options, and also daemons”, something a fair number of Chaos fanboys don’t understand, but the fact is they largely chose to stick with old traditional weapons and not invent new crazy shit, leaving that to the traditionalist conservative Imperials.


I tried searching for Chaos Luddite, and the first thing that came up was Boris Johnson.

FrankT:

There are nine Traitor Legions as well as five flavors of Daemonworld armies and several flavors of Chaos Cultists. And so if you go deep enough into the Chaos codex army options and magazine supplements and shit, you can get some armies that are pretty effective. But in Grey Codex land you don't really get any of that. They sort of approximate it by letting you take certain kinds of expensive elites as troops if you buy certain upgrades for your leader. But honestly you don't even want four units of Noise Marines.


Noise Marines are actually pretty effective in grey codex land, and sonic weapons are more plausible than gyrojets and much more likely that laser propelled needle weaponry, but if you're afflicted by “a sense of shame” you may not want to field any units of noise marines.

Koumei:

A note on sonic weaponry: the Imperium has access to that, as mining equipment. The Mechanicus have access to an Ordinatus weapon that needs about 2-3 Baneblade’s size worth of industrial tractors to carry and sends a wave of “Go fuck yourself” across the field, but it was basically repurposed from excavation stuff designed for making giant tunnels. Similarly, mining colonies have siesmic cannons that use sonic waves to shatter rocks, and when those slaves colonists get infected by Genestealers (more on those later!), they use those as weapons. But they didn’t sit down and say “Right, let’s use sonic weapons specifically to kill a bunch of assholes!” and they had the good sense to not make them look like guitars.

FrankT:

Sure, there are some weird break points you can get, where you can get Nurgle attack bikes that push the toughness up to 6 and make it so that they only take wounds on a 6 and only fail armor saves on a 1 (that's 36 shots from bolter weaponry to do any real damage). But even that isn't really all that exciting and is rarely worth the points cost. You can catch people out when they were expecting to be shooting at Marines and you pull stuff off the rack that's almost off the RNG from that, but it's real expensive and if your opponent randomly has some anti-vehicle weapons that happen to do the job you are seriously screwed.


Objectively overpriced options that nonetheless can become game breaking if you successfully guess what kind of army your opponent is bringing to the table. Usually you guess wrong.

With enough Chaos options written up in various places in future installments, you eventually got access to some options that were quite effective and weren't overpriced. So there have been a few times when various specific flavors of Chaos were OP. Most of the time they were not. And in Grey Codex land, they aren't even close.

Koumei:

I personally loved the debates about whether your Chaos Lord of Nurgle (and it was always Nurgle for the Chaos Lord, every other Mark could get fucked) should take a Chair (and get a bunch of extra Wounds, which are more annoying to take away when you are Toughness 5), a Bike (and go up to Toughness 6 and also move fast), or Terminator Armour (and thus be T 5 with a 2+/5++). The last option sounds great until you remember that most of the weapons that you bother using against high Toughness are also AP 1 or 2 so you’re basically saying “Look, just use your melta and plasma guns here and direct the other guns elsewhere okay?”

Let’s get to why Chaos are the worst players. In part I just want to point at maglag and say exactly that and go have an early dinner. But let’s go into a little more depth: they take every codex other than the 3E one as a personal sleight and I say that as a former Sisters player. I understand to some extent, but it’s still going to annoy people, and basically if they don’t have the most overpowered codex on any given week then the bitch-fits ensue and they complain about being the single most neglected army. They wank on and on about how Chaos are bound to win and how they are the actual villain (or the actual heroes, but it’s always one of the two and never just “another bunch of dicks”) and really all of the Xenos should just get out of the way so everyone can focus on Chaos crushing the Imperium. When they don’t win story-guiding tournaments by over-representing things at the tables (the black spiky faction of EVERY wargame gets disproportionate representation at events, this says a lot about wargamers), the orgs just fix it in their favour anyway. And of course, they basically want “Everything the Imperium has, but with more options, and universal Fearless, and also allied Daemons and more and better psychic powers.”

Oh and the followers of Khorne specifically are amongst the worst of “shouting bell-ends” (is there a kanji for that? That would make a great hip tattoo!) with their “BLOOD FOR THE BLOOD GOD! SKULLS FOR THE SKULL THRONE!” nonsense.


Even UK roads know what you are.

Tyranids


Basically this.

FrankT:

The Tyranids and the Genestealers were originally two groups of hexapedal aliens that did different stuff. The Tyranids were slavers and masters of biotech who flew around in living ships collecting slave races and bowing down to Hive Tyrants. Meanwhile the Genestealers were the Aliens from Aliens who snuck around the galaxy raping hybrids into people and bleeding acid when they got cut. With second edition, the Genestealer was folded into the Tyranids and the Zoat was removed entirely for 3rd edition. Nowadays the Tyranids don't seem to have slave races at all, and the Genestealers are shot out ahead of the invasion fleets to land on planets and space stations and wreck up the place so Tyranids can more easily murderstab everyone.


Pictured: a Zoat. Once upon a time even 40k had centaurs of a kind. I suppose it still does if you include that one Necron character.

Of course, it would be remiss of us to not note that in fact the way Tyranid space travel is supposed to work, it should be impossible for them to shoot out tiny scout pods with Genestealers in them “ahead” of the fleet in any meaningful fashion. It's perfectly reasonable to have high mass carriers as your means of FTL, real world FTL probably works that way. But if you pile everything onto one big super ship to go faster, the little scout pods you shoot off would by definition move slower.

Since the Tyranids stopped being Slavers and started being Eaters, they just generally lack an understandable motivation for anything they do. The Tyranids are completely illogical in a way that even the forces of Chaos don't manage to achieve. Sure, it doesn't make sense to pile up a half dozen skulls for the glory of Slanesh, but once you've made the suspension of disbelief to acknowledge that Slanesh wants piles of six skulls decorating things and that some hedonist supervillain also wants to make Slanesh happy, then the next step of actually making such piles naturally follows. Tyranids don't have that. Their supposed goal is acquire biomass, so they attack cities and fly between stars. Rather than just fucking farming, because acquiring biomass from sunlight is the easiest fucking thing in the whole universe. Even one celled algae can fucking do it.

But whatever. The Tyranids are simultaneous the Xenomorphs from Alien and the Bugs from Starship Troopers. Or in other words: the Tyranids in 3rd edition are the Zerg. They are literally exactly the Zerg, and where Blizzard is ripping off Games Workshop and where Games Workshop is ripping off Blizzard is really hard to discern. They had been ripping each other off ever since Games Workshop pulled out of the licensing talks for Orcs vs. Humans. It is also true that Blizzard went far more in depth into the Zerg hive than Games Workshop ever did with Tyranid hives. The Tyranids don't make any “sense” in the traditional sense, and there doesn't seem to be anything you can meaningfully discuss with them.


It's kind of sad when “Zerg Rush” is simply more interesting than the thing your company has produced. But here we are.

Koumei:

I prefer the following for a statement on the intellectual prowess of the Tyranid Hive Minds and the thought that went into creating them:


Tyranids are younger than the Starship Troopers book, but older than the film, so you can sit and argue as long as you like about where the theft happened in that particular exchange. Tyranids pre-date the Zerg entirely, but they did undergo a very significant re-design. Warriors used to look like this:



During the lifespan of 3Ed they released the more familiar ones.

FrankT:

Like Orcs, the Tyranids are conceptually a swarm army, where you are supposed to blanket the battlefield with waves of disposable exoskeletoned scuttling troops. And like the Orcs, this doesn't generally work out. Your scrub troops aren't actually all that cheap, and you're still supposed to field big monster dudes, and those are pretty expensive. The Carnifex is a pretty good deal in Grey Codex land, but we are still talking about an individual model that costs as much as many whole squads of normal sized dudes with guns.

The other issue of course is that this shit cost money. As in actual dollars or pounds or whatever currency equivalent you have in whatever country you live in, and weird ass bug monster models weren't especially cheap. In 2nd edition the hopping Tyranids with scything claws were the most expensive model in 40K in terms of dollars per point – which made an optimized Tyranid army pretty hard to field because you wanted a lot of those fuckers. I'm not sure what model held that dubious honor in 3rd edition, but I'd be pretty surprised if it wasn't one flavor or another of Tyranid.

Koumei:

I assume you were talking about the Ravener, which is a hopping Tyranid with scything claws but around Warrior size, with 2 Wounds and a minimum brood size of 1, and not the Hormagant, which is a hopping Tyranid with scything claws but gaunt sized, with 1 Wound and a minimum brood size of “a bunch”. Also while you could theoretically take one Ravener, that was a dumb idea so you took heaps. In 3Ed, it might have still been the Ravener, but Ogryn and Wraithguard were stupidly expensive as well.

FrankT:

Nah, I mean Hormies, which in 2nd edition were a crucial means of tying up enemy troops and also of getting the crucial multiple attackers bonus for your Hive Tyrant. Essentially every Hormagant contributed +1 to the Hive Tyrant's battle result, which let her strike an extra time with a bone sword and then continue moving and slaughtering across the enemy army. Obviously, when we stopped talking about weapon skill adjusted close combat results, the Hormagant stopped being useful.

As it was, the melee combat options of the Tyranids were mostly fake. This was Transport edition, and the Tyranids didn't have any transports at all. They were expected to crawl across the table and stab things, and that just didn't work. Anything in 3rd edition that was supposed to fight in close combat needed a mobility power to actually get to close combat or it was a joke unit.


The Tyranids had a lot of joke units.

The army you actually ended up fielding was a shooty army with some weird ass bioweapons that had no traction. Like, I literally just looked at the list of weapons, and right now I can't for the life of me remember what the different ones are called, let alone what the models were supposed to look like. The big problem with “biotech weapons” as Games Workshop envisioned them is that they fucking all looked the same. Some weird ass blobby bits with a gross melty mouth at one end. Who the fuck cares?

Koumei:

We could talk about how they eventually got the special rule to let their blobs of gaunts keep dying and coming back, but that wasn’t a Grey Codex thing, and 90% of the time that was a losing proposition. You spend extra points and then… in 1/3 of games you feed your opponent extra VP for wiping out your guys, and the rest of the time, they just mostly kill a unit and let it run away – because you can’t choose to suicide your unit and respawn, it has to be wiped out entirely. And even then it has to enter from your table edge and spend “the rest of the game” rushing up into action. So either spend those points on just having more gaunts, or maybe some Warriors to be relatively tough and spreading Fearlessness around your army, or just save the points up so you can have lots of lovely monsters.

Also if you’re in high school, you probably have access to an art room with kiln access. Make your own carnifexes and hive tyrants (especially going back to 3Ed when your Tyrant was made of metal and loved to fall apart) out of clay. They’re big enough that you can do a reasonable job without being super-skilled, you’re probably doing it for the price of “free”, and they’ll be near unbreakable.

FrankT:

When it comes to Codex changes, Tyranid players take it in the egg sack every time. It's not like the Marines where a codex change will make you swap some guns around and organize your units into five man squads instead of 10 man squads or paint a little doohickey on all your unit leaders because you need Veteran Sergeants instead of normal ones or whatever the fuck. If you woke up and the 3rd edition rules popped, you were instantly told that Carnifexes went from "basically pretty stupid" to "absolutely mandatory to have 3 of them." Now I don't remember how much the shitty old Carnifex model cost and I don't care enough to look it up, but the current one costs $53.75 in today's money. That's more than fifty cents a point, and the rest of the army isn't especially cheaper than that.

When the Codex came out, the mix of units that were good and bad were shuffled again. But of course individual models are shit hard to proxy or convert and are expensive as balls.

Koumei:

Tyranid players are the worst because they think tyranids are such a clever idea, and they’re delighted with the simplicity of something that “just eats”. Whilst also talking about how super-clever the Hive Mind is. They’re convinced that it just gets bigger and bigger as it crosses the galaxy and is automatically going to win in the end.

Oh also they’re pretty salty about the constant rough deal that most of their codex gets, and react by basically changing their entire army make-up to be “lots of the currently-winning unit” each time. Which is sensible in a way, but done to such an extreme that it’s also very obvious and you can tell the anger they hold. They are fielding their army with spite.

[maglag]

You know, when you consider the Eldar as Khorne worshippers worshipping daemons, wouldn't that make the Dark Eldar slightly less evil since at least those aren't summoning daemons?

Anyway, Orks are concepted as being a never ending green tide of aggression, but that doesn't really work out in practice. The first thing is that Orks Boyz are not in fact the cheapest regular dudes in the galaxy – that's Imperial Guard. And the second is that waddling into close combat on foot in 3rd edition is a fuckin death sentence. It's 3 turns until you can get into combat that way, and you aren't going to survive. If you don't have jump packs or a transport or something, you are not getting into close combat in a reasonable amount of time and this is not a reasonable life strategy. And the third is that, well, Orks aren't actually that good in close combat in the first place. They have the kinds of weapon skills and toughness that a Marine would be expected to have, but they lack the strength or armor save. All in all, the standard Ork “green tide” strategy involves you slowly crawling across the battlefield while people shoot you to ribbons and then in the latter half of the game you finally get into close combat and the few remaining Orks get mopped up with chainswords.

Two words: "more dakka".

Shooting the crap out of the enemy is a perfectly acceptable orky way of life. After all, they do have a bunch of shooty units like Tankbustaz, Lootaz, Flash Gitz and, well, Shoota boyz. Even got some shooty heroes.

Plus, the orks have one of the worst variety of melee weapons, even worse than the imperial guard (at least in more recent editions).

The high T and WS on the other hand means ork shooty units won't instantly melt when some assault marines charge them or something.

Let’s get to why Chaos are the worst players. In part I just want to point at maglag and say exactly that and go have an early dinner.

Yes, let the hate flow through you, and your jounery to the dark chaos side will be complete!

But let’s go into a little more depth: they take every codex other than the 3E one as a personal sleight and I say that as a former Sisters player. I understand to some extent, but it’s still going to annoy people, and basically if they don’t have the most overpowered codex on any given week then the bitch-fits ensue and they complain about being the single most neglected army.

If you were a Night Lords/Iron Warriors/Alpha Legion player, you had a perfectly valid reason to complain when, since 4th edition, you literally had zero codex support until the very end of 7th edition.

It was never a matter of OPness (although we'll always be bitter that loyalist scum gets strictly better options), but of choice. For a moment we had raptor troops, properly trained cultists, chaos lords with servo arms leading proper heavy artillery, and then it was all gone for 3 whole editions and half.

At least the sisters never got to have any of their squads completely removed from their available options.

They wank on and on about how Chaos are bound to win and how they are the actual villain (or the actual heroes, but it’s always one of the two and never just “another bunch of dicks”) and really all of the Xenos should just get out of the way so everyone can focus on Chaos crushing the Imperium. When they don’t win story-guiding tournaments by over-representing things at the tables (the black spiky faction of EVERY wargame gets disproportionate representation at events, this says a lot about wargamers), the orgs just fix it in their favour anyway.

Joke's on you since GW is now explicitly going that the main factions are Imperium, Chaos, and everybody else Xenos.

And of course, they basically want “Everything the Imperium has, but with more options, and universal Fearless, and also allied Daemons and more and better psychic powers.”

It's funny because it's the exact reverse that's been happening.

Chaos has 4 chaos marks? Well Imperium has dozens of chapter tactics.
Chaos has obliterators? Well Imperium gets centurions.
Chaos has daemon princes? Well Imperium scum gets dread knights.
Chaos has possessed? Well Imperium gets wulfen.
Chaos has cultists? Well Imperium can ally in Imperial Guard easy.
Chaos has daemons? Well Imperium can outright summon them too.
Chaos has unique psyker powers for non-Khorne gods? Well Imperium gets unique powers for each of the main chapters. And then got 3 unique disciplines just for being loyalist scum.
Chaos has a lord on Juggernaut? Well Imperium gets thunderwolf cavalry on both their leaders and elite units.
Chaos got some robots? Imperium gets two whole new mechanicus factions.

Imperium is the one that's been stealing chaos toys for years now. No wonder that several chaos players just gave up and started using loyalist scum rules for their chaos models.

[Mistborn]

I'm curious what your thoughts are on the xenos armies that debuted later on in the edition, Tau and Necrons. I had some limited experience with Oldcrons and remember them being good.

[Count Arioch the 28th]

I just want to say if I had the cash to take up an increasingly expensive hobby I'd play Imperial Guard. I want lots of tanks, and I want to airbrush "You're welcome" on them.

[Username17]

I'm curious what your thoughts are on the xenos armies that debuted later on in the edition, Tau and Necrons. I had some limited experience with Oldcrons and remember them being good.

Necrons are the worst thing. They are basically everything wrong with 3rd edition, cranked up to 11.

For starters, sometimes in 3rd edition you would go up against "a big pile of Marines" which with their high toughness and good armor and basically being fearless all over the place was quite difficult to do anything about if you didn't mathhammer the fuck out of whatever army you were playing. Necrons are basically that but so much more. Not only are they basically as hard to get rid of as Marines, but if you don't use super optimized weaponry then half of them come back every turn. If you find yourself with a bunch of lasguns or splinter rifles or whatever the fuck, you can can just fuck right off.

Secondly, a lot of times you could basically just look at the table after setup and work out who was going to win. For Necrons their army list was so short on release and their reaction to enemy weaponry so polarized and their weird ass alternate win/loss conditions so severe that you could work out who was going to win just by looking at the force selections of the other army. You basically knew what the Necron player was bringing and you knew how the game was going to go. Against a Dark Eldar list you pretty much checked to see if their Incubi squad was set up correctly and then counted the Dark Lances and if the Dark Lances was over the critical number you knew the Dark Eldar were going to win and if was under that you knew they were going to lose. It didn't even really matter where people set up, because Necrons were pretty much blob and trod no matter what they did.

Basically if the enemy was set up to lay down the hurt on enemy models that were tough in that particular way hard and fast enough, the Necrons were going to get blown out, and if not the Necrons were going to grind their ass down. Back before all the rounds of IG nerfs, I won total victories against Necrons on turn 3 because I ran with a Leman Russ and a Basilisk. Some other armies basically couldn't do anything.

But of course the other thing is that "tough in that particular way" wasn't sufficiently different from the way Marines were already tough so as to cause you to be caught out if you optimized to fight Marines most of the time (although some Eldar forces could be embarrassed if they relied heavily enough on Strength 6 shooting).

Boring to paint. Boring to play. Bad for the game in every possible way. Necrons were terrible and should have resulted in people being fired.

-Username17

[Judging__Eagle]

Imperium is the one that's been stealing chaos toys for years now. No wonder that several chaos players just gave up and started using loyalist scum rules for their chaos models.

Pretty much what I did. Once I had piles of spiky CSMs I tried to keep them looking fairly generic, and used whichever codex had been updated most recently. If the rules take too long to change for the better, I figured it would be better to just play the best parts I could get access to.

Which also lead me to organizing/storing my minis by their gear, instead of "by squad." I'd never be sure how many bolters, plasmas, flamers, heavy weapons, etc. I'd want in any army list, and mixing and matching gear loadouts tended to be the norm. Specializing squads with a as many as possible of the same weapon was common for my own CSM lists. Sometimes these were logical choices (all lascanons in this havoc squad, all heavy bolters in this one, basic CSM squads with x2 plasma guns). Sometimes less obvious (Veteran Squad w/ Infiltrator... & 3x Flamers? Sort of trash, but has a tendency to spook players when 3 templates hit the same squad).

While the bolters attached to the squad were there to give the special weapons some ablative wounds cheese. While I'm sure every army uses "these normal dudes are here to die to squeeze maximum pts value from the special weapons I paid extree for", removing discrete models has always felt weird for me in wargames (40k's vacillating over how model removal is decided from edition to edition doesn't help). Which is likely due to my own experiences began with Battle Masters "3 Wounds = Dead Unit Tray" mechanics (although, to be fair, almost everything about the gameplay was fucked up b/c 9 & 11 year olds don't quite parse the fundamental combat resolution correctly, until long after we no long played the game; also the card-draw-to-move mechanic made us unwilling to ever get close enough to be engaged, unless we could dogpile a unit).

One thing that I also found odd about 3e and onwards was that everyone else's Plasma guns suddenly were using Chaos Marines "We have oldbad Plasa-tech" mechanics. I guess someone at GW thought that anti-marine weapons should be nerfed across the board. Which is even more odd, b/c CSMs already had that mechanic; and I don't think anyone outside the Imperium factions used Plasma guns.

[Thaluikhain]

Eh, Fantasy high elves worship Khaine as well, just not exclusively.

You know, when you consider the Eldar as Khorne worshippers worshipping daemons, wouldn't that make the Dark Eldar slightly less evil since at least those aren't summoning daemons?

They have chaos beasts instead. Not daemons, but they are.

At least the sisters never got to have any of their squads completely removed from their available options.

Sisters, at that time, had sisters with bolters, and sisters with bolt pistols + jumppacks. Admittedly you had different squads of sisters with bolters based on how many heavy or special weapons they had, and some had better stats, but there's really not enough to take things away.

[Stahlseele]

@maglaq
what i do not understand about that mess is:
is that not the whole chaos shtick?
convert loyalist scum to their cause?
traitorlegions and traitor army dudes?
what happens, do they throw away their toys on the way over the line and never bother with them again?
i mean . . dark meachnicum is a thing that exists, yes?
so why can chaos not claim:"yep, this whole army of dark mechanicum defected from that shiney new mechanicus factions you have there after being told that they would have to share their toys and also pay extra taxes because they are new and now we have them too"?

[Judging__Eagle]

@Stashlsteele

Chaos has always had a "our tech is old & hasn't been receiving their regularly ordained 1,000 year hardware/software updates"; so they're 10 upgrade cycles of obsolescence b/c they've literally been using the same pieces of equipment for the past 10k years (which is only cognitively tolerable b/c "The Warp" makes physics become subjective, not objective).

Which is alright as a means to set CSM apart from SM (and when almost everything about them is the same, the more differences there are the better it supports the narrative of "Like SM, but different"), and means CSM have received a hodgepodge "variant" weapons and weapon rules from what SM would have. Some of these minor mechanic variations that I can recall include:

-'Reaper' Autocannons (instead of Ass. Cannons) for Termis; slightly better than Autocannons, but I'm positive were worse (at firerate) than Ass. Cannons
-'Combi' Bolters (instead of Stormbolters) for Termis (Sometimes somewhat better than Stormbolters?)
-Plasma Guns that vent on the user (until, all plasma guns got the Chaos nerf b/c decent weapons vs SM can't be too easy to use)
-Plasma Cannons are Dreadnought Only (Ok? I'm not really sure if it's an ideal Dread weapon)
-A mechanically decent, but logically stupid, Dread melee weapon meant to give a lot of attacks
-Some variant Terminator Power Weapons (No Power Mauls, but Power Maces instead) that barely differed in 3e+, but probably differed by tiny amounts in 2e
-The various Noise Marine weapons (there were... 3?). While people keep griping that "Evil Space Marine Rockstars" are a bad idea, I've always been more than a little in favour of them due to the fact that they're literally Heavy Metal musicians in a figuratively heavy metal (although, really more of a 2000 AD) setting.
-Khornate Chainaxes (Possibly a tiny bit better at killing, which is fucking hilarious given the fact that the initial plastic Khorne Berzerkers for 2e were molded with chainswords)
-Nurgle Plague Marines got a special auto-wounding plagueknife
-Nurgle used to have LOS blocking disease skull grenades (I don't think anyone really used them)
-Tzeentch (eventually) gave its (once) useless non-Sorcerer marines special magic bolters. I never owned Tzeentch marines, so I never used them.

Beyond that, there are some variant vehicle options like Demonic Marks, that made vehicles behave differently from Imperial ones, but aside from Demonic Possession, or possibly Khorne's "Destroyer" mark, not many people care. I can't even recall the Slaanesh vehicle mark offhand; Tzeentch had some warpfire field, Nurgle had Nurglings.

The thing is, the argument you're making that CSMs should have Dark Mechanicum allies (who should logically, if not at least narratively have all sorts of crazy crap for weapons, cyborgs and robots) is probably too well reasoned and too logical for GW to implement.

If it was Space Marine/40k Epic/Armageddon, then yes such changes might exist, and Dark Mechanicum can add all sorts of crazy pre-Crusade Mechanicum weapons, as well as Demonic Mechanicum war engines that are crazier than the existing 10mm scale Demonic Engines; but this is 28mm; and nothing about it is meant to resemble a decent wargame. Mostly b/c 40k is a "special minis collecting" product line, whose minis are slightly upsized from its closest wargame minis scales, and makes inserting non-GW minis into armies b/c 28mm isn't a scale that fits in existing wargaming minis scale charts.

[Koumei]

I can't even tell you what would be a good way to make a "slow, relentless, undying robot army" ruleset within 40K that works well with what they already had at the time. Maybe have them all be 2-Wound creatures with low Toughness (so you ideally want to shoot them with S 6+ guns) and have "controller" robots emit an electric sphere that worked like Synapse where units in X inches were immune to Instant Death (so you wanted Snipers THEN Plasma guns, or you wanted to just fire lots and lots of lasguns). I dunno. But yeah, Necrons did not work when they first started to exist.

I also can't tell you much about how Tau played out back then, either. But I'm going to assume the writers wanted you to take 3-4 squads of little men, backed up by 1-2 skimmers and a couple of squads of mecha, and what players wanted to do was take a legion of mecha and fuck everything else, and thus they spent their Mandatory 2 Troops slots on cheap shitty Kroot.

Then later on when Outflanking became the new black (in 40k no less), they took loads of Kroot to basically line the walls and block Outflanking. But would have been happier if there were cheaper "Build a wall and make the Mexicans pay for it: 10 points, the sides are walled off and there is no Outflanking".

-'Reaper' Autocannons (instead of Ass. Cannons) for Termis; slightly better than Autocannons, but I'm positive were worse (at firerate) than Ass. Cannons

Reaper is a Twin-Linked Autocannon except Terminators can take them. It's a very tasty option generally, Autocannons are quite nice and Twin-Linking them is fine. I don't know how many people put them on Terminators, but it wouldn't surprise me if there was one in every squad of the right size.

'Combi' Bolters (instead of Stormbolters) for Termis (Sometimes somewhat better than Stormbolters?)

A Storm Bolter is 2 feet of Assault 2, and a Combi-Bolter is a Twin-Linked Boltgun. This means at ranges of 13-24 inches, the Storm Bolter is around half a shot better (it's firing 2 shots out, not 1 shot with a re-roll to hit). At ranges of 1-12 inches, however, it's around nearly a shot worse (it's firing 2 shots out, not 2 shots with re-rolls to hit). On average, obviously. But if you want to charge, the Storm Bolter is better again because you can fire an Assault weapon and still charge (this is why people want them banned in America, fact fans), whereas Rapid Fire weapons like Boltguns are "Shoot OR Charge". Unless you're wearing Terminator Armour (which you almost certainly are) or are a Dreadnought (basically the only other possibility for "Has one of these weapons and also might want to charge").

I don't mind them having small "much of a muchness" differences like that to be honest. It's basically "Yeah, we upgraded our software to run the new Java update more reliably" "We decided to just disable Java, shoot anyone who uses it, and use specific Ruby scripts for anything we need". Except with less of a morale case to be made (fuck Java).

Plasma Cannons are Dreadnought Only (Ok? I'm not really sure if it's an ideal Dread weapon)

Back then, it was good enough on Dreads because "Gets Hot!" didn't apply to vehicles. They gave zero fucks about superheated gases being vented all over their paintwork, whereas people react poorly to it.

Some variant Terminator Power Weapons (No Power Mauls, but Power Maces instead) that barely differed in 3e+, but probably differed by tiny amounts in 2e

Actually they didn't differ at all in 3Ed, they were all just "Power Weapons". I don't know why they didn't get the option for Hammer & Shield though, that was just weird.

Beyond that, there are some variant vehicle options like Demonic Marks, that made vehicles behave differently from Imperial ones, but aside from Demonic Possession, or possibly Khorne's "Destroyer" mark, not many people care. I can't even recall the Slaanesh vehicle mark offhand; Tzeentch had some warpfire field, Nurgle had Nurglings.

Slaanesh had a loud siren that lowered the Leadership of people it wanted to drive over - Sisters would also get that in their 3E Dex (and never again). I can't remember if they specifically stated "THIS IS A SLAANESH THING" in the wargear section or if it was just generally understood. There was at least one edition where you could just take destroyer blades (like a Deffrolla for Ork vehicles) and the loud noise, and Warpfire Gargoyles. You could also, in only the 3E Codex and never again, have the vehicle be infected by a virus that made all of its Armour values 1 point higher.

Frank, can you tell me as a doctor if any viruses in the real world only have the effect of "makes you tougher" with no drawbacks? GW seem utterly convinced that tuberculosis makes you really resilient.

[OgreBattle]

I wonder why they never gave Eldar plasma guns. I mean squads of melta guns are awesome 2nd edition shuriken catapults already shredded infantry armor like plasma.

Think plasma could've been given a different role than "better than a boltgun (occasionally kills you" too.

[Zaranthan]

IIRC, the rationale for Nurgle's various durability boosts was that you're infected with all kinds of crazy shit and have necrotized flesh and pus blisters all over your body, but Nurgle's blessing means these don't actually have an adverse effect on your ability to DO anything. Thus, they're just extra body parts, and the rule represents the bullet landing there and not causing a "real" wound, or possibly the old "gunslinger with a bible in their pocket" myth.

In a related note, I took the liberty of googling "fuck dark eldar" and was quite happy with the results. NSFW:

[Lokathor]

I always thought that the Orks were supposed to be Jamaican.

[OgreBattle]

I can't even tell you what would be a good way to make a "slow, relentless, undying robot army" ruleset within 40K that works well with what they already had at the time. Maybe have them all be 2-Wound creatures with low Toughness (so you ideally want to shoot them with S 6+ guns) and have "controller" robots emit an electric sphere that worked like Synapse where units in X inches were immune to Instant Death (so you wanted Snipers THEN Plasma guns, or you wanted to just fire lots and lots of lasguns). I dunno. But yeah, Necrons did not work when they first started to exist.

e3 grotesques (now considered wracks) were t3 but could only be killed by... s5 or s6 or higher.

I also can't tell you much about how Tau played out back then, either. But I'm going to assume the writers wanted you to take 3-4 squads of little men, backed up by 1-2 skimmers and a couple of squads of mecha, and what players wanted to do was take a legion of mecha and fuck everything else, and thus they spent their Mandatory 2 Troops slots on cheap shitty Kroot.

Fish of Fury. You take two Devilfishes form a chevron-bunker with fire warriors in the middle. The Line of Sight rules of the time meant the warriors could fire over the low drone hangar part of the devilfish. Skimmer rules of the time meant the devilfish were only hit on 6's and formed a very powerful bunker against assault, the main weakness of Tau.

Some variant Terminator Power Weapons (No Power Mauls, but Power Maces instead) that barely differed in 3e+, but probably differed by tiny amounts in 2e
....
Actually they didn't differ at all in 3Ed, they were all just "Power Weapons". I don't know why they didn't get the option for Hammer & Shield though, that was just weird.

Power claws were the same as power fists too, as in 2nd edition they were "power fist that deals more wounds". In codex 3e releases is when power claws become "reroll wounding power sword attacked to a fat fist"

[maglag]

@maglaq
what i do not understand about that mess is:
is that not the whole chaos shtick?
convert loyalist scum to their cause?
traitorlegions and traitor army dudes?
what happens, do they throw away their toys on the way over the line and never bother with them again?

With 8th edition it seems like is exactly that, since the new Nurgle Chaos Lord can suddenly take the Catchpracthi pattern terminator armor that dates back to the 30k (and which loyalist scum could take core since 7th edition).

Although poor maintenance is also a reason since one key advantage of loyalist scum is they having legions of disciplined slave serfs to take care of that while chaos cultists aren't so big in making sure everything is nice and tidy.

i mean . . dark meachnicum is a thing that exists, yes?
so why can chaos not claim:"yep, this whole army of dark mechanicum defected from that shiney new mechanicus factions you have there after being told that they would have to share their toys and also pay extra taxes because they are new and now we have them too"?

There's plenty of Dark Mechanicus on the fluff and even forge worlds on the warp, not so much on the rules, at least directly. Somebody is maintaining the chaos titans and chaos knights and there's even a big cyborg daemon besides the defiler and dinobots, otherwise fuck you.

Speaking of which, 8th edition lets daemon princes take guns again! Something else really missed since 3rd edition.

One thing that I also found odd about 3e and onwards was that everyone else's Plasma guns suddenly were using Chaos Marines "We have oldbad Plasa-tech" mechanics. I guess someone at GW thought that anti-marine weapons should be nerfed across the board. Which is even more odd, b/c CSMs already had that mechanic; and I don't think anyone outside the Imperium factions used Plasma guns.

Tau have plasma guns as an option for crisis suits, and Eldar have star cannons which are explicitly stated to be plasma guns just with fancy names. Thing is both those factions keep the safety on when shooting those weapons, resulting in lower S6 in return for no chance of killing yourself.

And if you look at the Imperium fluff, there are several mentions that the imperial plasma guns are unsafe precisely because they're removing the safeties because the Imperium cares more about killing the "enemy" than persevering their troop's lifes. Heck, in 3rd edition there was even a veterans doctrine that allowed you to re-roll 1s in to-hit rolls with guns other than plasma precisely because there was no such thing as a trained plasma gunner. You would always melt yourself before that.

And now in 8th edition basic plasma guns can choose to keep the safety on or off, with no safety resulting in higher damage but a 1 for shooting will kill the shooter outright.

IIRC, the rationale for Nurgle's various durability boosts was that you're infected with all kinds of crazy shit and have necrotized flesh and pus blisters all over your body, but Nurgle's blessing means these don't actually have an adverse effect on your ability to DO anything. Thus, they're just extra body parts, and the rule represents the bullet landing there and not causing a "real" wound, or possibly the old "gunslinger with a bible in their pocket" myth.

Riding a bike also makes you tougher. Even after you stopped and are trying to stab the other dude.

[GâtFromKI]

Will you do Space Marine/epic 40 000 OSSR? I played it when it was called Space Marine, and it was for me the most enjoyable GW's game (seconded with Blood Bowl 2 - which is quite an anomaly in the gaming world, it look like a fantasy american football game but it's a luck management simulator; you win by having a better understanding of probabilities than your opponent, and by trying to "minimize your possible loss" instead of "maximizing your possible gain" - because the mechanics strongly punish a failed gamble).

It was the opposite of HeroHammer (single badass units, like Titan, were underwhelming and quickly dispatched by cheaper fast melee units like cavalry; they tried to buff titans during the whole life of the game, and they ended up with an unkillable imperator titan and your opponent simply ignored it because it was unkillable but didn't deal enough damage for its cost), and the scale of the models allowed people to use proxy quite easily.


Put a canon on this, and it becomes indistinguishable from a Space Marine/Epic 40k Excalibur tank.


Orcs and marines from the initial box. You can use them as eldars or squats or chaos and nobody will spot the difference.


Here are a squat overlord and a lego part. Can you determine which is which?

In the end, i bought a lot of WH40k model, my brother painted a lot of them, but we played almost exclusively Space Marine/Epic 40k. With legos and models from the initial set (and a box containing 6 titans identical to the one in the initial box).

Is there a single main reason 40K ended up being the more popular Warhammer game? (E.g. better rules, better art direction, the wargame fanbase tends to prefer science fantasy over fantasy, etc.) Or is it one of those situations where there were a lot of small factors that each contributed a bit?

One. single. reason:

An army of 30 models in WHFB: so there are 20 soldiers with pike, and... Oh wait, I'm already bored and I don't care about the rest of the army.

An army of 30 models in WH40k: so there a 20 marines; those guys are so awesome, half of the imagery of the game is about them. Then 5 terminators, who are even awesomer. 1 dreadnought, one speeder or two, two or three heroes. Oh man, now I want to play.

WHFB and WH40k are games where the main pleasure aren't the rules, but the models you have in your hands. WHFB requires you to use a lot of boring models which are boring to paint and boring to look at and boring to play with - they are so boring, they are stacked in groups of 20 model that play as 1 single model. WH40k is playable with every single model being awesome and awesome to paint (...I don't like painting models, but my brother do) and awesome to look at and awesome to play with. Hence WH40k >> WHFB. Even if the rules were pure shit and WHFB had awesome rules, WH40K >> WHFB.

If you want the rules to be the main selling point of your game, then you should use model with a smaller scale like Space Marine/Epic 40k: smaller models are faster to paint and easier to proxy. Or your game should use less models like Blood Bowl (or Necromunda, but I've never played Necromunda).

Basically, the cheapest way to field a half-decent mid '90s WHFB army was to embrace the much-maligned tactic of Hero Hammer, a practice in which you built your army around champions, special characters and santa sacks filled with magical swag instead of buying another block of tiny men.

From what I remember, similar strategy could be ridiculously efficient with WH40K 2nd edition as well. Characters had high stats, several wounds, access to non-modifiable armor save and some powerful weapons, and unlike squads weren't forced to shoot at the closest target. Spending the maximum allowed points onto characters and using them to go after the opponents' characters and smallest squads could often net you enough points to win (especially with the Assassins, Witch Hunt or Take and Hold mission cards).

Some armies had ways to beat such setup, but there were costly.

If I remember correctly, heavy weapons were able to quickly dispatch most of the heroes: high strength, several wound per hit; and whatever you do, you'll only success a few amount of non-modifiable 3+ save... They costed more than normal weapons, but less than heroes. It was more some sort of rock-paper-scissor game: heavy weapons were a cheap way to eliminate heroes and demons and vehicles but were useless against cheaper infantry, cheap infantry wasn't able to scratch heroes/demons/vehicles but was most cost-efficient than heavy weapons/elite units otherwise.

There were some exceptions, like the assassins that were very hard to aim. But most of the time, your major demon was great if he was able to kill half of your opponent's army, but he wasn't that great when he was killed first turn by some random dude with a heavy laser.


(If you played Tyranids, you didn't have heavy weapons, but genestealer were cheap, fast-running, and 5 of them were enough to kill most of the heroes if they were able to reach melee range; cheaper units were most cost-efficient to kill infantry. I don't know about every army but I think everyone had a cheap way to kill toughness 10 units.

As Frank stated in another thread, the best way to win was degenerate armies - like imperial guard with a lot of infantry and nothing heavy, so you're opponent's heavy guns are useless. Or the other way around, heavy-only army. This isn't good, but it's better than WHFB where the only way to win is to have a bigger hero than your opponent).

[shlominus]

WHFB and WH40k are games where the main pleasure aren't the rules, but the models you have in your hands.

this is true for every miniature wargame ever made.

tabletop wargaming is grown men finding an excuse for playing with toy soldiers.

WHFB requires you to use a lot of boring models which are boring to paint and boring to look at and boring to play with - they are so boring, they are stacked in groups of 20 model that play as 1 single model. WH40k is playable with every single model being awesome and awesome to paint (...I don't like painting models, but my brother do) and awesome to look at and awesome to play with. Hence WH40k >> WHFB. Even if the rules were pure shit and WHFB had awesome rules, WH40K >> WHFB.

that's just a matter of taste obviously. i loved the armies i saw yesterday in the kow-tourney i played and from your point of view most armies would have been quite boring indeed. for a lot of people rank and file units have their own charm, which is one of the many reasons aos bombed.

i'm pretty sure that including historical wargaming (traditionally having incredibly "boring" armies ) would tip the balance towards "boring" games being much more popular. i doubt that any reasonable data is available though.
40k might beat warhammer fantasy but overall "boring" > "awesome".

[maglag]

Who says you can only proxy epic with lego for 40K tabletop?

As Frank stated in another thread, the best way to win was degenerate armies - like imperial guard with a lot of infantry and nothing heavy, so you're opponent's heavy guns are useless. Or the other way around, heavy-only army.

It remained that way until 7th edition (judge still is up on 8th edition): either you saturate the field with vehicles, or you don't. If you're gonna bring a monstrous creature, bring at least 3.

WHFB and WH40k are games where the main pleasure aren't the rules, but the models you have in your hands.

this is true for every miniature wargame ever made.

tabletop wargaming is grown men finding an excuse for playing with toy soldiers.

I've met another 40K player that justified playing toy soldiers to his wife with "would you rather I spend this money with booze?"

[GâtFromKI]

Who says you can only proxy epic with lego for 40K tabletop?

Koumei already showed a lot of awesome lego proxies for wh40k in the other thread. So I know it exists; it's just easier to proxy in epic since 1 lego piece = 1 vehicle (and then you may add a canon or something, but you never try to make it look good at that scale - the exception being titans).

Anyway you're right, there were awesome lego proxies in the other thread but not in this one. Any wh40k thread should contain a minimal amount of lego proxies.


And an ork trukk in spoiler (i think the image is a bit too large for the forum):