Horus Heresy Rules

I'm a bit late to the proverbial party on this one. But on the Warhammer community website, it has been announced that the Horus Heresy will be getting their own rules set. This is not new, of course, as we have known about it for a while.

What strikes me is the replies on the Games Workshop Facebook group. When asked whether the psychic phase was going to be revised or not, there were a lot of non committal answers given. Why would this be so? Have Forge World or GW not agreed upon the rules yet? Are things in such a state of flux that straight forward questions like this cannot be answered? Or perhaps are we saving ourselves up for spoilers that will be revealed later.

From what was stated though, it is clear that the Horus Heresy rules are going to be an updated version of 7th with all of the needless stuff eliminated from the set. So entries like "And They Shall Know No Fear" will likely be removed from this rule book and other rules (perhaps a full explainer of "Primarch" rules) will be inserted?

In all of this, I'm somewhat torn. I do like the effort they have made to keep things in 7th at some level. But at another level, its really disheartening that the community has been split like this. I'd still like to play against Eldar using whatever set of rules we can. But should that be 7th or 8th edition? I no longer know. No one does. Until there is a 30k Eldar book released, I guess we will do what we can. Which will probably mean I write a space marine army list for my Alpha Legion. It will lack all the character that I have grown accustomed to though. Equally, this is a fate shared by 40k armies like the Raven Guard (or basically anything that isn't vanilla marines). Hopefully the newer 40k codex releases will give some flavour back to these armies and I can write some kind of army list for 8th that would be an Alpha Legion analogue (perhaps based on the Raven Guard -- hence my mentioning them in particular).

Goodbye to 7th Tournament: Boards

Friday saw a "Goodbye to 7th" tournament. I was playing my 30k Alpha Legion force, and I'll detail the battles in full reports later on. But for now, I wanted to show the tables that we were playing on and fighting over. Each was themed and some had a few special rules (e.g., difficult terrain in the water and nearby to deathworld scenery; fires that provide cover, but a certain distance must be maintained away from). The scenery is a mixture of Games Workshop, MDF terrain from CNC miniature scenery and TTcombat, plus various homemade items and other items. 

World: 1417-402.  Cognomens: Isha’s Necklace.

Classed as a death world by the forces of the Sons of Horus, 1417-402 has a single redeeming feature – a very large ocean teeming with moderately benign life. In comparison, its archipelagos are covered with all manner of flora and fauna widely to be considered immiscible to human colonization. Control of this world and its oceans could provide a food supply for planets many sectors removed. 

World: Ravishol.  Cognomens: None.

Ravishol is part of the 500 worlds in the realm of Ultramar and comes under the direct purview of the Ultramarines. After the Betrayal at Calth, the planet came under attack from unknown forces, although reports variously suggest World Eaters, Blackshields and Knights-Errant for a similarly wide variety of reasons. Ten thousand years later, Nurgle looks to attempt to gain a foothold here too. Sent here to investigate, any would-be attacker would have to contend with the corpses of the cities that litter its surface.

World: 53.417.  Cognomen: Altruism.

Discovered by an Iron Hands fleet during the Great Crusade, the world of Altruism was marked early on as a good prospect for colonization. Although at the hot end of ideal temperatures for unenhanced humans, the colonists readily took to the world and founded a settlement. It was not long thereafter that deep deposits of valuable minerals and fuel were discovered. Altruism thrived and is a prosperous, yet minimally inhabited world making it an easy target for all warlords.

World: Angstrom’s Rest. Cognomens: 1772-2.  (Imperial Fists).

A small contingent of Imperial Fists secured this world against the large predators that had plagued the small human population locked here since the night of the Age of Darkness. Cut off by warp storms themselves, the Fists established a temporary operation on the surface of the planet for the purposes of refuelling their orbital cruisers

World: Tancredi. Cognomen: 15-220.

All Forge Worlds are important to the Mechanicum and offer significant resources to would be conqueres. The world of Tancredi is no exception. Sitting at a pressure point between segmenta, Tancredi was ever on the list of targets for the enemy, and for worlds to be protected by the Imperium due to its vast shipyards. Tancredi finds itself at a nexus in both time and space.

Proliferation in 7th Edition 40k

Context
A bit of an editorial from me today, on the topic of proliferation in 40k. Although the word "proliferation" is usually used in a biological context, today I'm using it to simply mean the growth and multiplication of things. Specifically units, codexes and the like.

Rogue Trader Era
To start the discussion, let's go way to the start: Rogue Trader and the like. In those times, all the possible units and creatures for 40k were contained inside a single rule book - the Rogue Trader rule book. It didn't particularly matter if one player forgot their rule book as the other player who brought it would be able to tell them everything that they needed to know (and maybe forgot) about the units and creatures they were playing. This was good at the time, as it meant that both players in a game automatically knew everything about their opponent's army and their own.

Fourth Edition

Fast forward a little bit in to the era of 4th edition and we see a large growth in codexes. One for Chaos Space Marines (that still included daemons!). One for space marines (as well as those for non-codex chapters). One for Orks. One for Eldar. And so forth. In this era, Most people knew about the core armies that they would be playing against. People knew that all regular space marines had T4, S4, 1 wound each, and so forth. They had a good feeling for Orks - unlikely to hit and kill much with their ranged weapons, but reasonably good in close combat. Eldar were known to be a bit fiddly and required finesse to master. Chaos were not the same as space marines (particularly in the Ld department) and often better in close combat.

In the 4th edition, I feel that people still knew all the armies and permutations of them. They knew how to set up their armies to counter them. And they knew how to conduct a good game regardless of circumstances. And they still knew their opponents and their likely tactics. Whether this was a rhino rush, or a static gun line.

Proliferation

Forward a bit further in the years and we see the introduction of a few new armies. The Necrons came along with a rather limited number of units and we all learnt that reanimation protocols needed some strong weapons to circumvent. Then the Tau - excellent gun lines with high strength weapons, but very vulnerable to close combat. Some armies waxed in their power with new iterations of their codex, some waned as other things got nerfed. Chaos Space Marines and Daemons got split it to two codexes. Yet, players still knew roughly what every army did. Imperial Guard still brought tanks for the most part. Space marines were still the most forgiving army to play due to their 3+ saves. And so forth.

But now, I feel the meta is utterly different due to three things:

(i) the ability to take allies

(ii) the idea of unbound armies outside of Apocalypse

(iii) the multitude of data slates (Be'Lakor, Eldar Ghost Warriors, Cypher, Butcher horde, to name but a few) and new (arguably smaller) codexes and codex supplements (Skitarii, Harlequins, Clan Raukaan, Khorne Daemonkin, etc.).

It has now reached a stage where I can no longer look at a tournament (or casual) army and automatically know what they are about. 

It perhaps was not so bad when allies were first introduced. Eldar plus Dark Eldar - yes, we all knew what they were going to do. Daemons with Chaos Space Marines made for good fluff and solid armies (especially Nurgle on my part). Tau and Eldar were a popular choice for a variety of reasons. And death star units were in the ascendancy - especially the screamers of Tzeentch in pure daemons lists.

But now, I sometimes feel that I'm playing a mini-apocalypse game due to the sheer proliferation I see. What are those Orks doing with Astra Militarum? Are those Grey Knights going to be summoning daemons or not? Remind me, because I can't remember, what does Be'Lakor do again? What are Skitarii good at and bad at - what are their weaknesses and how should I counter deploy on the board?

Discussion

Is this a bad thing? 

Yes and No. Yes in the sense that I no longer know exactly how to play and exactly how my opponents army operates. No in the sense it is really nice to see a multitude of possible armies with vastly different strengths and weaknesses. 

The former means that games tend to take longer. Both players often question a lot of rules and more time has to be spent explaining what things do. This has been a progressive thing since Rogue Trader I think (yes - I'm that old) and hence my experience of the game is that is now takes a lot longer. I think this kind of detracts form the game a little bit - at least for those of us who did experience much earlier editions. Equally, at least we got rid of the old 40k vehicles book with its OHP transparency for hits. And all those d1000 tables from Realms of Chaos that made the game very unbalanced -- not that balance is necessarily any better in the current era, but perhaps a bit less random (except for daemons, obviously!). The game is nice and streamlined now - and that can only be a good thing!

The latter is something that I actually love. All those new armies are terrific to see. Especially for old timers like me. They can still provide surprises! Even if the "expense" is longer games. And I get to learn some new rules about a data slate I don't own once in a while.

So on balance, the recent proliferation we're seeing in the game might be a good one. But I'll temper that by the "entry cost" to the game, and the not knowing what an enemy army is going to do for newer, and even older players like myself.

The new meta for 7th: Psykers?

When I look back at what I wrote when 6th edition came along, I suggested that the new meta would rotate around flying and flyers. Was that the correct prediction?

In part perhaps. Certainly the advent of flyers such as the Heldrake became defining for a number of Chaos builds. And certainly many marine armies started to feature flyers of their own to a greater or lesser extent.

This had one direct effect on the kinds of armies that I employed: they would either feature flyers of their own, or have multiple ways of dealing with and counteracting flyers. Mark for instance the growth in the number of sky fire squads and fortifications. But I missed out on the sheer growth of deathstar units (but quickly caught on…).

In 7th, I'm going to go out on a (ambiguously sized) limb and suggest that psykers and the psionics phase will come to be the defining feature of the new edition, with unbound armies coming almost in parallel to that (but even perhaps in 2nd place to psionics). Not only will the new system, I think, lead to a huge increase in psykers on the battlefield, but it will also lead to an increase in ways to counter them. Just in the same way that flyers did for 6th. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It just leads to more builds and a different type of arms race. At least in the sense that it is now a very wide open field when it comes to army building. I think we're going to see many armies focusing on psychics, but we're also going to see some other more left-field armies have incredible success as folks build armies on a different meta - perhaps excessive numbers of flyers, infiltrators, jump infantry, drop pod death, fortifications plus defenders or other shenanigans. Being so wide open, its going to see a plethora of builds that will all prove viable one way or another. At least that's my prediction. In so much as the new psychics will open up very specific builds but as armies are constructed around its boons or counter-measures, others will take out the field by some out-of-the-box thinking.

That said, I am concerned as a daemons player. Although I certainly have enough daemonettes, plaguebearers, pink horrors, and bloodletters to summon (and indeed: greater daemons), I worry that a chaos army focussed around summoning extra daemons will be quickly banned in more competitive and casual play.

In the meantime: Vive Le Revolution!