Goatboy’s 40k: Another Week of 8th Hints
Goatboy here again and we got another week of delicious 40k hints. Let’s look at the big hints we got this week and what this means.
The tidbits given have me very excited for this new edition and right now I am just chomping at the bits to see the full rules. Its killing me that I can’t brew up new lists and think of how some my older armies might be good again. This is the biggest frustration now as everything is pointing towards a June release so I am going to have to wait a bit longer to see how I will fight on the table top in the future.
Shooting
The shooting phase information came out right after my article and while it doesn’t have a ton of difference then before – it still gave some decent information. We got direct info on not being able to shoot after advancing. This is the same as before for the most part with just a few armies getting allowed to run and then shoot. There also is a bit of information that says you can’t shoot if an enemy is within 1 inch of you unless – gasp you have a pistol. This means all those Plasma Pistol they give out to every new plastic clamshell character actually has some use. Cover goes towards the AOS model where they just effect the armor save of the model so I suspect the entire unit needs to be in the cover to actually get it like AOS. You can’t shoot into combat and out of combat beyond pistols so that is a big difference from AOS. The removal of snapfire mechanic for a flat -1 to shooting if you move with a heavy weapon is pretty interesting. It at least means you can always move and shoot and don’t feel like you are wasting your heavy shots by needing a 6 to hit. No info on how you hit flyers beyond some chatter that says their rules of flying high will be on their “data sheet” whenever that comes out. Overall the shooting bits make sense and don’t seem to shift much from what we have played with before.
Charging
The Charge phase is up next and this isn’t a direct copy of AOS as well. It would appear you need to target an enemy so that implies that if you shot at a unit first you most likely have to target them with your charge. The big update is that if you get within an inch of the enemy you have engaged them. This gives you an extra inch of assault so the average on a 2d6 is 7 so it would mean 8 inch charges will be the norm. The cool bit is that when you activate the unit you can move them 3 inches and engage other units by pulling within an inch of them. This will be something that will catch new players if they misplace their models and your assault squad gets to ignore a units overwatch. Overall it is the same sort of mechanics and didn’t give a ton more info other then those small tweaks. We only know charges get to go first but no info on bonus’s, weapon effects, etc that might be coming to the data sheet we are wanting to see.
Assault
The continued fight save with the locked in “to hit” rates is a pretty big change. The ability to hide behind a high WS is gone and instead it is just replaced by that model hitting things really well. I don’t know how good that is because we don’t know how many more wounds some of these bad ass fighters have now. I suspect will get a direct bit of info on how Characters and IC’s will work soon. Depending on how they will engage combat and interact will be important. Speaking of combat – the addition of “battleshock” to 40k is a huge one. If you haven’t played AOS, at the end of a player turn every unit that lost models needs to make a roll and adding the amount of models they lost in that turn. They match it to their Leadership and every point they lose by there is a model lost in that unit. If they unit has a Leadership of 7, they lose 5 guys, and roll a 6 they end up losing 4 more models from the unit. Depending on how they deal with Leadership bubbles and other effects this could be very devastating to a unit. I don’t expect things to last long once they start to lose models throughout the game. It makes me think will see lots of bubble no battleshock or high leadership abilities. This also leads me to think IC’s have been removed from the game as the tiny hint of a Dark Apostle ability really makes me think they don’t join units anymore. Plus it would mean that a unit who takes a ton of battleshock damage won’t randomly lose a character in the unit that is not part of the initial unit. We’ll see if they hint more about it.
Army Construction
The final bit of rules info they dropped has me very excited as it finally gives me a hint of how to build armies. The lose of Formations is a good thing as they really caused a lot of issues. I remember playing an event where I had 3 formations without any hint of “building” an old force org style army. I was lucky that my faction would allow me to do it while a ton of others just couldn’t build the type of armies that you need to do well on the competitive scene. It also means most of the broken 7th edition things were removed and leaves us with a more locked in army building system. They say there are 14 different force org types listed and more will be coming when they start to release more army books. I am surprised they didn’t do the AOS method which has basic Force Org you have to use but formations can count for “choices” within the force org. IE troop choices in a formation would be troop choices for the force org. Still this all east feels like a concentrated effort to bring some kind of overarching balancing to the armies. The hint that command points will be heavily used and needed to compete makes me think the basic force orgs will be most likely used. I guess it depends on how good the command points end up being but any form of ability that lets you control rerolls and generate effects should be a strong thing. I just hope we don’t see anything “free” or as devastating as some of the old formation abilities.
Overall the hints and bits has me ready for this new edition. I also hear a lot of events are excited to move to 8th edition as well. There is nothing worse then trying to play 2 different versions of the game depending on where you are at in the tournament scene. I know a lot of events are ready for a balanced rule set that lets everyone’s army work. This means every game is a challenge and it comes down to the general versus the strength of the army/list.
~ Until next time – roll 6’s.
