Category Archives: rules and tactics

40k 6th Edition Space Marines: Vulkan

Posted on by tjkopena

Games Workshop put out a new Space Marines codex last week.  Today I started putting together some army lists and will be posting thoughts as I go.  First up: Everyone’s favorite flaming hero, Vulkan He’stan.

Vulkan

Like nearly everyone, last edition I eventually caved and started running Vulkan.  He was just too good to resist—army wide Flamer and Melta buffs, with a standard Captain stat line but a 2+/3++ save, Digital Weapons, a Relic Blade, and a Heavy Flamer and Bolt Pistol to boot.  His points in the new book remain the same, a large but not crazy 190, and all of his stats and gear are also identical.  So he’s of slightly less value given that a Salamanders army gets the Flamer buff for free, and neither buffs Thunderhammers anymore.  However, I think he still stacks up pretty solidly.  I’ve generally found Vulkan to be fairly survivable and able to go toe-to-toe with tough units, so 190 points is not unreasonable for this HQ.  The one negative I’ll say about him is that his Warlord Trait (Iron Resolve: +1 to combat resolution w/ Vulkan in the fight) is terribly underwhelming.  The whole Space Marine trait list is weak across the board, and that is not one of the stronger ones.

In any event, by way of comparison, a very similar generic captain would run like so:

  • Captain: 90 points
  • Artificier Armour: 20
  • Storm Shield: 15
  • Power Weapon: 15
  • Relic Blade: 25
  • Digital Weapons: 10

There’s no option to pick up a heavy flamer on the Captain, unfortunately.  That totals 175 points, so for 15 more Vulkan’s picking up a Heavy Flamer and buffs all Melta weapons to Master-Crafted.  So, Vulkan is probably worth it if you want to run this basic setup.  I’ve found the Heavy Flamer actually fairly useful, and the Melta buff alone could easily be worth 15 points in many armies.

My other response is that’s pretty awesome and a huge improvement in the Space Marine codex.  Generic HQs in the previous book were just slightly boring in their options, and very inefficient compared to the named heroes.  They just cost too many points for how (un-)survivable a Space Marine leader is and to miss out on the army wide buffs, previously only granted by the named HQs.  So, that’s super awesome that you can now pretty much construct the named guys out of the generic options and get the bulk of the buffs from the Chapter Tactics.  That gives a ton of options.  In this case, you could basically run Vulkan but shaving a couple points with a generic guy if you don’t need the Melta buff, or you could upgrade to the Burning Blade and/or some other Chapter Relics if you wanted to beef him out to a heavier close combat fighter.  I’m super stoked about that.

Kingbreakers

So, for now at least, I’m probably going to run Vulkan and then see how I want to tailor things tighter to my playing style.  Next up: Librarians!

40k Sixth Edition First Thoughts

Posted on by tjkopena

While away this summer I missed the launch of 40k Sixth Edition.  Tuesday I swung by Redcap’s to pick up a copy of the rulebook in preparation for PAGE on Sunday.  These are some of my first, pre-play thoughts.  I’ve only skimmed through very very quickly so far, so I’m sure I’ve missed important things and misunderstood or incorrectly analyzed some points below.

The Cover & Art

The cover is pretty solid.  That sounds like a trivial concern, but GW definitely screws them up from time to time and it is actually a big part of the general appeal of any ruleset.

This one is very squarely within the tradition of GW covers, particularly those featuring Space Marines, even the heretical ones.  It’s not super inspiring to me, but it’s also not filled with lots of amateur perspective errors and such like the latest Blood Angels codex.  I like that it doesn’t have any borders, I think it makes it stand out a bit, and I also dig the yellow tint.  These guys have a good gallery of all the 40k book covers up until recently.  These are the main rulebooks:

Right now I sort of like the more abstract 5th edition cover as the best overall, but I’m pretty sure this is going to grow on me and be just as liked.

In general I really like a lot of the new paintings in the book.  They convey well the sense of massive, sprawling, inconceivably chaotic battles.  The foldout pages are also kind of interesting though I have to look through those sections more.  I have mixed feelings about the photos in the actual rule sections.  They look good and are clear in and of themselves, but I think they’re also just a bit distracting from the business at hand on the page.

Pre-Measuring

When I started playing 40k it bothered me tremendously that you couldn’t pre-measure anything.  In particulary, it gives more seasoned players a huge boost over new miniatures players.  Over time though I grew ok with it, especially as I got pretty good at judging distances.

At this point, I could go either way on this one.  It’ll be better for newer players, and though it does take away a skill, I’m not sure the skill was an important one.  That said, I’m extremely concerned that pre-measuring will be a real problem in tournament play as it gives a player yet another way to drag out a game and stall to run out the clock.

Wound Allocation

It seems that the wound allocation rules got a lot simpler.  Mechanically I thought the 5e rules were pretty ok, but they certainly came across as complex the first time, lead to endless confusion, and a lot of somewhat cheesy manipulation.  Simply wounding the closest guys is a lot simpler.  Pre-release I saw some people complaining that it’ll be a lot slower, but I don’t think that will be the case in practice.  People will identify shortcuts for common situations, while the rules will be nicely formal and clean.

On the one hand I agree that it’s unfortunate that players will go back to hiding their most important models in the back of a group.  Hopefully this is mitigated a bit by Precision Shots and Challenges, discussed below.  On the other hand, I think forcing an opponent to remove from the front weakens assault units just a little bit.  If you have to pull from the front and I manage to wipe out a whole bunch of guys on the front line, then I’ve delayed your assault.  Personally I felt assault was a lot more powerful than shooting in 5e, so this kind of chipping away at that imbalance is a good thing.

Overwatch

I was originally excited to hear about Overwatch joining the game, but these rules seem kind of silly.  Sure, in a pinch BS 1 attacks might do something, but for the most part I usually wouldn’t even feel they’re worth rolling.  In return, the player doesn’t have to make any sort of decision.  You would almost never not take advantage of Overwatch, except those very rare occasions when you want to be assaulted, as there’s no downside.

I think it would have been better to have Overwatch be stronger, but have some cost.  E.g., forego shooting in the my current turn in order to have the ability to fire Overwatch as normal shooting in the other player’s Movement or Assault phases.  That would let me do things like skip some wimpy shooting now, e.g., if I don’t have good line of sight, in order to have good shots when he clusters everybody up at me to assault next turn, or runs a unit across an alley in front of me.

Charge

The changes to charging seem really really really unfortunate.  With the addition of pre-measuring, I could see they’d want some randomness in charging.  I personally am not convinced it’s necessary, but I could understand.  This seems ridiculous though.  Two inches through twelve inches is a huge swing.  That’s really random.  Much worse, counter to the point above, this seems to be a very random but significant boost to assaulting units.  Now they have real potential to be mixing it up with your dudes even faster.  To mind mind that’s exactly the opposite direction the game needed to go in.  Assaults were already overpowered, let alone the least dynamic and most boring part of the game.  We’ll see how this plays out in practice, but I’m pretty skeptical.

Our Weapons are Useless

The ability to choose to fail out of combat with something you can’t hurt is a nice little touch for anyone who’s ever been stuck going toe-to-toe with a Greater Demon or old school C’Tan.  It’s also a fairly minor buff as it’s a pretty hard thing to use well.  I always found the original Space Marine ability to do this very risky to put into play, so I think this is a good addition without changing much.

Multiple Combats

It’s very interesting that units charging multiple targets loses the +1 charge bonus.  That’s the kind of debuff Assault needed to balance it out against shooting.

Challenges

The potential problem of units hiding in the back might mentioned above be mitigated a bit by Challenges.  There do seem to be potential problems with Challenges though.  In particular, it seems like a strong buff to Assault oriented characters, as they can Assault a unit, Challenge its leader, and then not be brought down by a torrent of attacks from the lesser guys.  Granted it means the lesser guys can’t be hit by the assaulting character either, but it also means the attacked unit is locked up in Assault even longer, usually not what it wants.

Special Rules

At first it seemed a little strange that some of these moved into the core rulebook.  And They Shall Know No Fear?  In the main book?  But then I realized it’s probably part of an effort to consolidate all the splintered factions—namely the Space Marines—without actually selling a smaller catalog of books.  If that rule is in here, then they can continue to sell twelve thousand different Space Marine codexes but just update this one rule instance in order to upgrade or modify all of them.

There do seem to now be a ridiculous number of special rules though.  On the one hand it’s really good that they’re all here in the main book so you don’t need to buy every codex in order to know the rules.  On the other hand it highlights just how baroque the ruleset is.  That they are so gribbly isn’t necessarily a problem, but it does indicate a lot of potential for ambiguities and unexpected conflicting or overpowering combos.

Interestingly, bringing all the special rules together is probably also good for the designers as they can look at everything all at once and have an easier time looking for problems.  To aid that they should have grouped all these into the aspects they affect—movement, shooting, and so on.  However, you know this centralization isn’t going to stop them from adding more special rules to the individual codexes, particularly the way those have been going recently with lots of crazy special stuff, so all of that’s probably a moot point.

Deny the Witch

It’s probably good that everybody now has at least some chance to deny psychic powers.

Vehicles

I will have to process these some more, but off the cuff it seems that vehicles also got buffed to a fair degree.  With glancing hits now not having any chance whatsoever to immobilize, stun, or destroy guns, you won’t be able to suppress enemy vehicles through torrents of small arms fire, but looking quickly at the hull points tables, they’ll take just as long to destroy.  Maybe longer.  In some ways it’s interesting that vehicles are now more equivalent to monstrous creatures—the latter of which also previously did not degrade in firepower as they took damage—but vehicles really didn’t need that kind of boost to begin with.

Conclusion

Fifth edition was an obvious, immediate improvement over the 4th edition rulebook in almost every way—clarity, streamlining, and mechanics.  Here it’s not clear to me just reading through whether there’s been progress, stasis, or a step back, but I’m reasonably optimistic.

I am fairly sure though that if it’s the latter it was not a huge step back.  The big caveat to that is I’m fairly concerned about Assault and Vehicles being even more dominant.  I was really hoping things would swing back the other way a bit.  I gather Colin has switched to Imperial Guard now, which without knowing anything else I take as a sign that vehicles did indeed get buffed.

It does also seem that there are even more little rules and gotchas in play that will be tough to remember, or slow things down a bit.  Precision Shooting from characters is a good example of both:  I’ll never remember to apply it, and it’ll slow things down rolling that special shot, even though mechanically I think it’s a good thing.

On the purely positive side, in a few places it does seem that there’s a bit more formality and structure to the rules, which is a good sign.

Fortunately for me, I’m not super big into tournaments, especially now and for the foreseeable future, and certainly not into very serious ones.  I think that’s where most rules problems and shortcomings really show up.  Otherwise it’s of much less—though not zero—concern how streamlined or conflict-free the rules are, so I’m sure it’ll still be a blast to play with friends and I’m looking forward to giving Sixth Edition a spin this weekend.

Dark Eldar Quick First Review

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This week I’ve been reading over the new Dark Eldar codex. These are some of my first impressions. As a side note, I was not super familiar with previous editions of the codex, so much of it was new to me.

Cover

GW definitely goes up and down on the quality of its codex covers. Marines have generally been ok, if a little staid. Blood Angels were terrible—boring scene, poor technical execution (proportions, body angles, etc.). Skaven were solid, as is the Dark Eldar cover. It well conveys the feeling of a horde of killers oozing out of a sudden, inky darkness exploding over their target.

Models

mandrakeBy and large the new model range is excellent, and a vast improvement over the previous models. The Mandrakes in particular stand out. Previously a pretty stupid looking collection of generic Dark Eldar looking figures in gratuitous gimp suits, now they’re exciting and original. The models fit in really well with the fluff of shadow beings able to appear at will out of the darkness, and I really like them a lot. I’m also a big fan of the new Reavers, which have a much more exciting style, rider pose, and dynamism than previous jetbikes and bikes.

Other new models for the army are all also pretty good. They look much more serious and original than the previous line. Of note, they have a lot of edges, like the plating on their armor, and other details that I think many people will be able to paint up very nicely without much difficulty. The artwork for the units without models also looks good, so I’m looking forward to those being released. Artwork for Scourges, Wracks, and Grotesques in particular all look great, so I’m excited to see how those models come out.

I got a chance to check some models out in person at Redcap’s the other day, and a couple more things stood out that you can’t tell from the book or website. One is their scale; the models are small, very thin and lithe. The height still doesn’t match up correct for Space Marines to actually be eight foot tall warriors, but the body proportions look a lot more in scale. The Dark Eldar are notably thinner than Imperial Guardsmen. When you look at these guys it definitely makes sense that they’re all Toughness 3.

The other thing the GW pictures don’t convey is the number of options available. There are a good number of leg stances and enough poseability that even the large units have enough variety. Most notably though, the boxes seem to have a ton of heads in them. From the website it looks like all the Wyches have long hair, all the Kabalites the tall helmets, and so on. I haven’t seen sprues, but from the assembled models Adam at Redcap’s had, it looks like you actually have a bunch of options in each box. Enough to make most of a unit with hair or the blank face masks—which I love—or the revised, much improved helmets in the Kabalite case. Pretty cool, and a potential way to help differentiate units.kabalite

Fluff & Book

The codex book is well done. There’s a good amount of fluff. Coming at it unfamiliar to the faction, I was happy with the quality and quantity of background material. It’s slightly difficult to imagine how such a race continues to function, but that’s true of most of the 40k factions and well within tolerable bounds for suspension of disbelief. Small touches along those lines though were well appreciated, e.g., discussion about there being small amounts of Dark Eldar procreation but most being bioengineered. There are also some good incidents highlighted, e.g., a crazy Salamanders assault into the heart of Commorragh itself to retrieve a captured ship. Although it’s somewhat sad that this is worth noting, the editing in the book seems to be on par with the recent books and much better than the previous editions. I only caught a couple cases of extraneous or missing words in the fluff. Similar to the Blood Angels book, a lot of of the black and white artwork is dark and lacking in contrast, but it’s workable. I guess that fits the mood, but a lot of the detail and quality would carry through better if it was lightened a touch & the contrast raised.

Rules

reaversObviously I’ll have to see the new units at work to really get a feel for them. However, my purely text-based take on them is definitely favorable. In particular, they have a lot of special rules and powers that bring a different feel and style to the army, without any of the angry and confused “WTF?!?!” that the Blood Angels book engenders. For example, Pain Tokens and the ability of many units to gain buffs such as Feel No Pain as they kill units is a new, interesting mechanic, fits in well with the fluff, and brings something novel to the faction without seeming terribly over the top. Nearly every unit has a special rule or ability, so it could be a confusing army to play against the first couple times, but for now I’m excited to see how they work out.

It’s not obvious from the text that there are any particularly terrible units in the book. Almost all seem to present interesting options. Reading through at first it’s almost discouraging because many units have a ton of close combat attacks and many others have a bunch of great shooting attacks. But, it’s not clear how to interpret that given the low Strength and Toughness of the units.

lelithConsider Lelith Hesperax, a stone cold killer. Every model against her loses one attack, to a minimum of one, because of her blades and barbed hair. She also has a 4+ Invulnerable, buffed to 3+ in close combat and her attacks ignore Armor Saves. On top of that she’sWS 9, BS 9, Initiative 9 (!) with 4 base attacks, plus a bonus for two close combat weapons, plus she gets an extra attack for each point by which her weapon skill beats the highest weapon skill in base-to-base with her. So, against a typical Tactical Squad she’s going to drop 11 attacks on the charge. But she’s strength 3. So, on average against MEQs 7.33 of those attacks will hit (11 attacks times 3+ to hit), and 2.44 of those will wound (7.33 hits times 5+ to wound), so she’s basically looking at 2 or 3 dead Marines. That’s pretty good, but it’s not over the top either. For 175 points she seems… probably reasonable? Maybe even fairly touchy to use, given that she doesn’t have shooting abilities and only a typical Invulnerable against shooting for an HQ, though she’s also likely to have Feel No Pain from a Pain Token. So, Lelith’s the fastest and the best, even more than the most powerful demons, but she’s ultimately a small humanoid. A lot of units are like that, though even less clear. A ton of attacks, powerful abilities, but all seemingly likely to be balanced out by relative weakness and fragility.

I gather there are probably better HQ choices in the book because of their other abilities, e.g., Vect’s 50% odds to Seize the Initiative, but Lelith highlights how I felt reading many of the writeups. At first I thought “Wow, that’s a ridiculous number of attacks and high stats!” Then I remembered she’s only S3 T3. I assume and hope the other crazy abilities balance out similarly. For example, it’s harder to evaluate, but the Dark Eldar definitely have some extreme mobility. Reavers can move 36 inches and get a 3+ Turboboost save! But they’re only Toughness 4 with the buff from their bike. It definitely comes across as a glass jaw army, with some serious aggressive capabilities but not much capacity to stand and take damage. Again though, things like Pain Tokens granting Feel No Pain change that, so it’ll be interesting to see how it plays out. Certainly at the moment I’m optimistic that the book is well balanced and look forward to some matches.dark-eldar

All pictures above are from Games Workshop, used without permission.