Deschenus Maximus

I hate the Mk X leg armour flanges too because they remind me of "hooker boots" (don't know the actual name for them) like Julia Roberts wore in Pretty Woman.

GW have reused the same icons for many games. I wouldn't read too much into the fact that this icon is also used in AT.

Re: LI - I just want them to do redo how melee works. 2D6 roll-offs for EVERY MODEL in a detachment is janky as hell. The rest of the rules I can live with. It DOES need a complete redo of the points, though.

The Terminators reminded me of this old comic. Needless to say, I am not a fan.

The dread looks ok but the Termies look really goofy to me. Can’t really make out what the Tacticals look like.

TIL that GW shut down their US factory

Bit of a tangent but here's another thing I don't understand: even if GW is not going to support out of print games like Mordheim and BFG, why not continue to make the rules for those games available to digitally purchase? The development costs have already been paid, and people are still playing them, even if the community for them isn't big enough to warrant a full tilt effort/full plastic release spread. You could even dabble in STL-making/selling!

Same. I've tried every wargame I know, even the extremely dull, watered-down bore that is Alpha Strike and my son just feels like it's too slow and boring. :/

Thanks all for your thoughtful inputs! Addressing some specific points: @Arikel I am 100% willing to believe you 10th is better than 9th but that’s not really my point. You’re comparing 40k to 40k. Compare 10th to completely different systems and the picture isn’t quite as pretty. @ThePenitentOne Even if GW wanted to retain IGOUGO, they could still make some improvements that would be a big step up from how the game plays now. Off the top of my head, simultaneous casualty resolution would alleviate the oft grumbled-about alpha strike issue. Also “And here's the thing: it was IGOUGO when you started playing. If IGOUGO is a deal breaker... I'm not sure why you started, or stuck with it for any length of time.” Because 40k was literally my first wargame. I wasn’t even aware there were other mechanics at the time. I’ll also say this about earlier editions of 40k, though: IGOUGO was not as much of an issue because the game was far less lethal. It’s why BFG still works fine in spite of being IGOUGO too – it takes a lot of effort to kill a ship (escorts excluded) so you rarely run into situations where player 2 will lose a significant portion of their fleet before getting to fire. @N1SB thanks so much for your detailed response. One consideration that is worth pondering: is the 4th ed DND vs 3rd ed a fitting comparison? I am not a DND player so I don’t know but did 3rd ed have good rules? If they did, I can see why people might have been upset with 4th. On the flipside, with how much people tend to complain about 40k’s rules, maybe a radical redesign wouldn’t be met with the same hostility?

So as a former 40k player who has embraced a lot of the non-40k GW offerings in the past few years, I keep asking myself why GW seems unable or unwilling to give 40k some actually good rules. It's a total mystery to me because they have proven they CAN write some pretty good rules: Adeptus Titanicus is just a fantastic Big Fighting Robot game that somehow perfectly straddles the line between the depth of classic Battletech and the speed of play of Alpha Strike. Epic: Armageddon serves up some of the best Combined Arms gameplay around. Its current successor, Legions Imperialis, has a lot of balance issues and some clunkyness (looking at you, melee combat!) but is still heads and shoulders above 40k now that we finally got a real FAQ for it. Battlefleet Gothic still casts a long shadow over all space fleet combat games in spite of being out of print for nearly 15 years thanks to its awesome rules. While I haven't played it, Kill Team 3.0 seems really solid as well. It's just 40k that continues to be hamstrung by legacy game mechanics (IGOUGO, most notably) and a lot of bloat (does every unit really need a special rule?). Is this just due to GW risk aversion? Are they scared that moving away from the original rules might leave to player exodus? And if so, is this fear really justified?

For those interested, someone had put a lot of time and effort into making E:A rules for Heresy already - but its missing many of the newer units like the Kratos. A couple of people have tried to restart the effort but nothing as come of it so far.

Working on some quick and dirty tokens for in-game effects: Token for when a unit successfully passes a morale test One for when a Detachment has used its Point Defence weapons in the movement phase One for when a Limited (X) weapon has used up its ammo One for when a Flyer switches to Hover One for when a detachment has withdrawn from combat One for getting hit by a Quake weapon One for getting hit by a Shock Pulse One for Detachments in a Broken formation Anything else I should add?

Tangential thought but I could see scope for multiple different version of the game with scaling rules granularity depending on the number of models you want to play with - kind of like 40k has Kill Team, Combat Patrol, regular 40k and then Apocalypse (now defunct but used to exist).

The thing is... can the game really be fixed? Melee is just a mess, and fixing it would make the game version 2.0 without actually calling it that.

My sincere hope is that they expedite a LI v2.0. I think it's the only thing that might allow the game to regain momentum. As was already said, there's been too many missteps that I don't see how they can turn things around at this point. And its not like a whole new edition wouldn't be warranted, because even though the FAQ helps A LOT, sorting out melee is still a massive chore, and the internal unit balance remains completely out of whack.