Apologies for the mouthful of a title, this one is going to be a bit of a disjointed collection of thoughts, but hey, here we are. Kicking off with my first game of the new 10th edition 40k: Orks vs Daemons!
This was a 1500 point game playing the standard Only War mission at the end of the free Core Rules. I was bringing the Orks, as is only right and proper for a first game, against Tony aka the Narrative Wargamer with his primarily Khorne based Chaos Daemons.
I took a mix of unit types, but keeping it fairly simple in terms of numbers of extra rules, with no enhancements. Three units of 20 choppa Boyz, two units each of three Killa Kans and Deff Koptas, a Battlewagon and a selection of characters: Weirdboy, Painboy, Warboss and Waaagh! Banner Nob (represented by the Goff Rokker!). The Boss and Banner went together with a unit in the Wagon.
The Daemons were a mix of infantry and big scary monsters. Two units of Bloodletters and a squad of Plaguebearers with a couple of support characters were backed up by a Skullcannon, a Daemon Prince, a Soulgrinder and the Bloodthirster.
Orks got turn one, surged forward to touch the middle objectives while leaving some Kans to guard the home one, did a bit of light shooting, and that was it, turn one of 10th edition completed!
Daemons responded in kind, leading to a couple of charges onto the objectives. Bloodletters cut into the 20 Boyz with Painboy, killing ten, but were stomped out by the return attacks. On the other flank the Soulgrinder went in to stomp a number of the Weirdboy's Boyz but took no damage in return.
Ork turn two meant WAAAGH! time, and the Weirdboy and friends sneakily jumped out of combat in order to charge the Skullcannon and take the daemon home objective! I'm pretty sure I didn't get Da Jump to work out this well for me in the entirety of 9th edition!
I plugged the gap they left with Killa Kans and the Warboss unit. Extra attack Kans punched some holes in the Soulgrinder before the WAAAGH!-boosted Warboss finished it off with nine strength eleven powerklaw attacks! Elsewhere the Painboy unit got a model back and then charged the Plaguebearers to ensure they didn't wander onto an objective - this mean the daemons were scoring no points on their turn!
The counter attack came in hot, with the angry Bloodthirster jumping over to mess with the Kans on my objective. The second Bloodletter squad turned around to go back for the Weirdboy/Boyz, and the Prince helped out the Plaguebearers. The big lad obviously did his thing, murdering the Kans and then killing a nearby Kopter with bonus mortal wounds, however the other two combats went a bit differently.
Bloodletters cut down a load of Orks, but in the WAAAGH! turn the remainder fought back hard and killed the entire unit! This scrap would eventually result in the Skullcannon killing off the remaining Boyz and the weirdboy, and only just suriving the resulting deadly demise! The Daemon Prince had it go a bit differently - he used a big 14 attack sweep, but between the new 5+ save and 5+ Feel No Pain, he was unable to make a real dent in the Boyz, though was essentially immune to most of their attacks with a FNP of his own added to high toughness and 2+ save. At the end of the game the Plaguebearers were all gone but the Prince had still not managed to completely wipe the unit!
So, my thoughts? Overall I really enjoyed it. It certainly felt like it will be a generally smoother and slightly quicker game once we've all learned the rules properly, and though there were a few weird rules interactions we weren't sure about, it seemed like a lot of the fiddly little details had been taken out. Simplified but not simple, as they say. My big takeaway however was that most of the units seemed to do more or less what they were supposed to, in a way that 9th tried to achieve but didn't quite. The big tough daemons took a lot of killing with T11, decent saves and loads of wounds. Rokkits were bouncing off them and buckets of dice from choppa attacks were only chipping off the odd wound occasionally. Similarly a mob of 20 Boyz with a character was a bit of a wall, taking a serious sustained effort to remove. Anti-elite Bloodletters were cutting down around 10 a time and then getting battered by the return attacks, and all the characters were adding powerful abilities. I could see myself running quite a lot of them!
Aside from the specifics of this game, I am excited to play more 10th and experiment with more stuff, though it's not all perfect. Balance is clearly going to be way off initially - and it always was going to be with a reset regardless of play testers, but I think the decision to 'power level' the points didn't help. I certainly don't hate it, it is nice and easy to just pay single costs for units, but I don't love it either. There's a lot of stuff that's just a no brainer, like the Deffrolla on the Battlewagon, that just hurts you for not modelling it that way (or alternatively encourages breaking WYSIWYG). I'm fairly confident that these sort of issues will be sorted in time though, through points updates and the full books.
Looking back over 9th edition, I can honestly say that I really enjoyed it, though it was clearly flawed. Once the complexity and power started ramping up it became very hard to keep up with and it clearly was not designed with the 'casual' player in mind. It had moments of actually being very well balanced and interesting from a veteran 40k player's perspective, but it must have been an absolute nightmare to have tried to get back into the game after a break of several years, only to come up against peak Drukhari or Tyranids and be wiped off the board in a slew of badly costed units and stacked special rules.
I think 9th had a bit of a reputation for being a tournament focused edition, but that's not strictly true. 9th brought is Crusade, and many, supplements with narrative rules - a lot of which I've spoken about at length! I'm glad GW decided to refine the Crusade format however, it seems like it will be much more balanced for random games between mismatched Crusades, and it also looks like the narrative element is kind of baked into the system a bit more.
I feel like 9th will be remembered as a bad edition by many, but I think it was quietly important. This was the edition where GW decided to allow themselves to change decades-old rules and try to make units play like they are actually supposed to. Orks are supposed to be really hard to kill, so they got toughness 5 after having T4 since the early 90s. Same with regular (and chaos, eventually) marines getting two wounds, and multi-meltas having two shots, and Eldar covered head to toe in armour getting a 4+ save. So many changes to rules and stats that were almost set in stone before, so that the models in the game felt just a little bit more like they 'should' do. They didn't always get it right of course, but I think that will be the positive legacy of 9th, being carried forward into 10th and beyond.
Now, with all that said, for me personally the shift to 9th also signified a shift to not recording every battle on this blog. Some get summarised as part of a larger post, some just get posted to Instagram. I don't always have the time or energy to do big write ups anymore, and though I did beat myself up about 'missing' a few, it is ultimately something I've decided I'm perfectly happy with. As I've always said, this blog is mostly for my own benefit, so I make no apologies for not getting out content regularly or to a specific standard. So what this means for the future is... not a lot really. I will continue with sporadic posting with no intent to cover everything, just a general overview of what I've been up to. I hope that if you are reading this you will find it entirely reasonable on my part, but even if you don't, thanks for reading and please stay safe out there.
