Tag Archives: 40k

First 40k Sixth Edition Game

Posted on by tjkopena

Tonight at PAGE, Jason, Valerie, Colin, and I got in my first match of sixth edition 40k.  Colin and I teamed up for a 2 on 2 of Space Marines and Imperial Guard versus Jason’s Deathwing Dark Angels and Valerie’s Eldar.  It was mostly a learning game as Jason coached Valerie in her very first game of 40k, with Colin also talking up changes for sixth edition.

Jason prepares for his doom!

Catachans stare down the oncoming treacherous Dark Angels.

There are definitely a lot of details all over the place that have changed and will require some attention to not overlook.  So far among the perhaps small yet I think consequential changes is that Rapid Fire weapons can now fire once at the full range, even after moving.  When I started playing 40k, two things really bothered about Space Marine Tactical Squads: 1) They didn’t have pistols, so they couldn’t shoot a unit they were about to assault.  2) They couldn’t move and shoot at range.  Both of these really cut down their options and just didn’t make much sense.  The previous edition took care of the first one, so it’s nice now for that second point to be closed up.

Kingbreakrs and Eldar race for the central objective.

Kingbreakers heroically assault deep into enemy lines.

Another interesting bit I had not caught up to until the game is that leaving Space Marine Drop Pods is a standard disembark, which now basically has a 6″ bubble around the vehicle.  That’s quite a bit of room to get out, move around, and shoot stuff up or dive into cover.

Focus Fire is also something of which good use of is going to be the hallmark of a good player over an average player.  It probably won’t have huge effects, but I think appropriate use of it could really help you out at times, and it presents a strong strategic tradeoff between more possible kills versus more likely kills.

A Dark Angel ancient stands fast in the face of the Kingbreaker attack.

The Dark Angels have neither mercy nor fear for the fallen.

Overall, I remain optimistic about the new edition.  In a few places it seems a bit more fiddly than the previous one, but not overly so.  Certainly there is a ton of new stuff in the rulebook, like flyers and terrain, but I think a lot of that can be safely set aside until everyone’s ready to incorporate it.  Or, you know, somebody shows up with a Stormtalon and everybody has to get ready in a hurry.

On a largely unrelated side note, the just-released Dark Vengeance box sets are absolutely amazing.  It seems like a great value at $107 for 49 miniatures (I guess $99 for 48 in the standard edition), and those miniatures are absolutely amazing.  The cultists in particular are super cool looking and extremely detailed.  I had to work really hard to impose some self-discipline and not pick up a box.

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.

Magnetizing A Predator

Posted on by tjkopena

Space Marines are among the best equipped and flexible armies in the Warhammer 40,000 universe. Their vehicles are therefore loaded with many options. This short tutorial presents some notes on magnetizing the weapons for a Predator tank so that different configurations can be easily used in different battles.

All the weapons options available for the Predator model in the box.

The process begins by assembling all the weapons and the main hull. The turret can be glued together, but don’t insert a weapon, as in the picture above.

An important point is to leave the various hatches unglued, and to assemble appropriately to meet all loadouts. By leaving the main turret mount unglued, the standard Rhino top doors may be put on to use the vehicle as a Rhino. Similarly, it’s rare for a Predator to equip an additional Storm Bolter, but this is standard kit for a Rhino. By assembling a blank and a Storm Bolter hatch but leaving them unglued, these can be readily swapped.

Note that the hatch holes might have to be scraped and sanded to enlarge them in order to easily plug the hatches in and out after painting. For this model the hatches have been assembled closed and the Storm Bolter on the basic swivel mount as other models in the army use the variants with exposed Marines.

Side sponson panels could also be magnetized for swapping with standard Rhino doors. However, this may not be worth the effort and is not done here as simply not mounting sponson weapons and putting on the standard top hatch and Storm Bolter will render the model clearly usable as a Rhino. Dozer blades are also a good candidate for magnetization, but are also not done here.

Hunter-Killer

Although probably the last part that should be done, the hunter-killer missile is a good example of a component worth magnetizing. It’s not typically equipped every game, and removing it during battle after firing is a great WYSIWYG reminder that it’s no longer available.

The first step is to determine an adequate space for the missile to be mounted on, and then use a pin vise to drill a pilot hole at that location.

Pin-drilling a pilot hole for the larger bit.

The pilot hole to guide the larger bit.

Standard 1/8″ rare earth magnets are used here, so a 1/8″ hole is made in the hull, into which one will fit snugly. A standard drill bit manipulated by hand will create such a hole quickly, cleanly, and easily. The pilot hole gives the larger bit a place to start and prevents it from shifting, creating an overly large hole or damaging the surrounding area. It’s fine to drill all the way through the thin top section of the hull. The magnet will fit snugly enough to not fall through, and this will enable it to be mounted flush with the top.

Drilling a larger hole for the magnet to sit into.

A 1/8″ hole in which the magnet will sit snugly.

Super-glue should then be dabbed into the hole and the magnet inserted. An easy way to do this is to put the magnet on a flat metal tool such as a hobby knife blade or the backside of a scraper. Insert the magnet into the hole, press it down flush with the top, and then slide the tool off horizontally. The magnet will stay in place as the tool slides. This is much easier to do than inserting it with fingers or tweezers.

Manipulating the magnet using a flat metal piece.

The magnet set in the Predator hull.

This process is then repeated for the hunter-killer missile, carefully drilling a pilot hole, then enlarging it, dabbing super-glue inside, and inserting a magnet. This hole should not be as deep as a magnet is tall, so that it sticks out slightly and provides a bit of a standoff.

Pin-drilling a pilot hole in the hunter-killer missile.

The pilot hole in the hunter-killer missile.

Drilling out the magnet hole in the hunter-killer missile.

The magnet hole in the hunter-killer missile.

Once set in place, the magnets can be very hard to extract. It is therefore critical to get the polarity correct the first time. A useful step is to put the second magnet on the target, ensuring it is aligned correctly, then sliding it off onto the tool to be manipulated so that the face to be inserted remains showing.

Checking the polarity orientation of the magnet to put in the hunter-killer.

The magnet set in the hunter-killer.

Another critical point is that it is well worth ensuring that all of the similar magnetized pieces in an army are oriented to the same polarity. For example, every hunter-killer missile should have their magnet set with the same magnetic facing, so that any one of them may be used on any tank. It is a true inconvenience to have magnetized parts but still have to match particular components up to particular models.

Finally, if super-glue does not adequately hold a magnet in place, deepen the hole slightly, insert a blob of greenstuff or greystuff, and re-insert the magnet. Once hardened, the clay will hold the magnet securely.

Sponsons

Using the same basic techniques, the sponsons are easily magnetized. The key aspect of this is to ensure at least the same side weapons use the same polarity orientation! The slots on top of the weapons could be filled with greenstuff or similar, but are completely obscured on the tabletop by the support arms so it’s unnecessary.

Magnets set in the sponson weapons.

Setting magnets in the sponson arms is a simple matter of slightly enlarging the existing holes, applying glue, inserting the magnet, and gluing the sensor piece on top.

These could be made more elaborate by building up a standoff or attaching the magnet to the original weapon strut. However, this is extra work that is not noticeable on the tabletop. Attaching the magnet to the strut is also significantly more flimsy, with the magnet liable to being popped off the arm in transit.

Magnet set in the sponson arms.

Turret

The final component to magnetize is then the main turret. There are several approaches to doing this, but all involve sheering off the pivot arms of the weapons so that the sides are flush.

One approach is then to mount a magnet in the side of the turret opening where the pivot arms would otherwise go, and then mount magnets in the sides of each weapon. However, this approach is slightly tricky to pull off such that the weapon does not tilt slightly when set. It is also prone to the weapon drooping.

Much easier and more reliably better looking is to mount a magnet in the top leading edge of the turret and in the top of the weapon backend, just behind the angle plate. These would be tricky to line up exactly, but it’s not necessary. The magnets are strong enough to hold the weapon in place even when not perfectly touching. As long as the magnets are roughly flush and centered, the weapon will align correctly and not droop when placed.

Again, make sure to double check the polarity orientation of the magnets before inserting into the weapons, and to use the same arrangement as on other tanks in the army if applicable.

Magnets set in the main turret weapons.

Finished

And that’s it, the Predator is now ready to roll with whatever weapons the day’s opponent entails!

The finished Predator, loaded out as DakkaPred.