Warhammer 40K: The ‘Legions Imperialis’ Rules The Grimdark Needs To Steal
GW’s new game Legions Imperialis has some rules that I really wish 40K would steal. We’re looking at you GW!
Legions Imperialis looks like a pretty cool game. It brings back an old part of Warhammer and seems to be made for playing some epic games (heh). It’s also a game that has some pretty cool and neat rules. Some of them are callbacks to older GW games. Others are newer rules that might be new to a lot of players. While these rules are meant for the smaller scale LI, at least a few are really great ideas that 40K should steal. Let’s take a look at which ones.
Simple Vehicle Facings
Starting in 8th Edition 40k moved to drastically simplify how vehicles worked. While the new rules have made things more simple, a lot of players would argue that they are now too simple. Vehicles just no longer feel like vehicles at all and have no weight. Instead they just kind of float around the table, and the model itself matters very little. Imperialis has a pretty simple way of helping to fix this. Basically, each teensy EPIC scale vehicle has a line drawn across its middle that separates it into a front and a rear arc.
This is, in effect, a simplified version of old 40K system of having four arcs (shown above). While that system had a lot more nuance, it also could lead to some arguments and it was a bit hard on some vehicles to tell where the arcs were. However, a simple front/back system is much easier. This would split the difference, making facing matter to a degree. But it would still allow for some enhanced vehicle detail while keeping things easy. Having arcs also lets you key other rules off them, like some weapons only firing in one arc.
Rear Shots
One of the ways that LI uses these facings (detailed above) that I really like is the idea of rear shots. Again, this is a rule that is much simpler than how things used to be in 40K, but that keeps some nuance. Back in the day, facing used to have totally different armor values, and you had to keep track of all of those. Now that is all gone, but again this has really made vehicles feel a lot less. It’s not just the vehicle’s position that should matter, but also how you position your models to fight it. Both in real life and in fiction, vehicles has weakness, exhaust ports or the like, you can target. Right now in 40K this doesn’t appear at all.
LI has a nice way of making this matter. In essence, if you attack a tank from the rear arc, you get an extra point of AP on your attack to represent the weaker rear armor. It’s a simple rule that doesn’t require recordkeeping and works easily across the board. It rewards good unit placement and movement. It makes tanks feel different than infantry and make the model matter a lot more. No more driving backwards at the enemy. It’s also not the hugest bonus so it doesn’t kill tanks value. For some tanks, like Land Raiders you could even give them a rule to ignore this, but I think overall, its a rule 40K would benefit a lot from.
Detailed Terrain Rules
Look 10th Edition’s terrain rules are kind of a disappointment. Indeed people have had issues with terrain for the last couple Editions, as its a hard thing to get right. However, 10ths in particular seem pretty lacking. LI, on the other hand, has a pretty great and detailed set of rules that I can’t fully go into here. Not all of them would work in 40K. They have some significant rules for garrisoning buildings that just wouldn’t really work. However, I think they are more in the right direction than 40K, with solid rules that make things like forests matter, and allow you to hide in them.
AT and Light AT weapons
This is a pair of rules given to a lot of weapons in LI that I really like. In effect, weapons with AT do not get their AP when targeting infantry/cav and weapons with Light AT do not get their AP when targeting vehicles. This makes a pretty firm delineation between weapons that are good at targeting infantry and those that are anti-tank weapons. For instance they note that a Lasconnon is great at killing a single Rhino, but not great at mowing down a bunch of dudes.
Now these rules are easier to rationalize in Legions Imperialis with its large scale. However, I do think 40K could use something like this a lot. I don’t know if it’s the exact rule, but Light AT in particular, would be nice. They are rules that force you to take a variety of weapons and not just the one best gun in the game (looking at you plasma for quite a few editions). It’s a good way of switching things up and encouraging more combined arms weapon diversity in lists.
Let us know what Legions Imperialis rules you’d like to see added to 40K, down in the comments!
