Preface
So this is my first post for july, I figured it best to do it on the tuesday rather than the monday, since I'm not going to recoup my lost adherence for june. So, we'll pretend this book didn't come out a month or two ago, and that it's brand new. Okay? Okay.My Understanding
As an idea of what I'm going to be talking about, I don't personally think of this as "Seventh Edition". I think of it as "Six Point Seven Five Edition". You're probably rolling your eyes, thinking "God, you pretentious twit, just say 6.5 like everyone else." But, I can give good reason for why I say 6.75 and not 6.5. The first is that 7th edition has a few, huge, radical changes that completely morph the way we build and play our armies. So, I look at 6.75 with hopeful eyes, and expect big things in the future.
Big Changes for 7th
One of the big changes in sixth was the inclusion of fortifications in the FOC. Now, we have LoW making an appearance. I'm probably never going to personally accept Lords of War in regular games - I realise that GW is doing a damn fine job of shoving them down my throat - they almost succeeded with Ghazkull Thraka (Did I mention I'm starting orks? No? Well, My guard army's almost done), but I along with my gaming group have pretty much stonewalled the idea of playing LoW in regular play. I'm happy to play them above 2k; but I very rarely venture outside of 1999+1 range.
The other biggest two changes have to be the Maelstrom of War Missions and the related Cards, as well as the psychic phase. The Maelstrom of war missions are a little imbalanced, and force certain armies to sit for turns without objectives to complete - unless you houserule them, which is something one should not have to do. Once houseruled, these MoW objectives become a lot of fun and potentially make sure that armies have to be just that little more than 4 units and a deathstar. Of course MoW was meant for fun games, not competitive play. I don't think anyone disagrees with that.
The Psychic phase I'm iffy about. I hate Daemonology with a passion, and feel that the Chaotic Daemonology is a bird to the screams for more balance within the ranks of the daemons codex, with the +1 to cover save being the cherry on top to 0 point pink horror squads. If it's not abused (which is altogether far too easy to do), though, it's a relatively balanced system for which we have to give props; It made lower rung psykers like weirdboyz more reliable and tempting while limiting the effectiveness of farseers and ubercasters like Severin Loth. Smaller Changes
Of course, this edition also had slight rules changes implemented, such as the very correct change to vector striking and FMC abilities. The Grounding check changes are cold comfort to Blood Thirsters and Khorneate daemon princes who got no bonuses from being FMC. Also, the changes to Moving through cover on the charge were nice. I'm iffy about terrain dataslates, I'm probably gonna stick to the old terrain rules unless warhamz tournaments start getting used to the idea.
The other nice change was that MCs cannot be joined by characters, effectively ending O'vesa star for good. Too bad they forgot to end screamerstar. Oh, they also removed the power of buff ICs like shadowsun; no more 2+ cover on my farsight bomb.
As we wait on baited breath
No Changes introduced to really improve combat aside from the MTC bonus which only furthered Beast's power as the only real charging unit in the game. They could've given Transports the ability to let their contents charge if they didn't move that turn, but I guess we can't have everything, can we?
The Result
I guess the Result can be simply put as happiness. Most of the changes were good, and there was a lot of fleshing out done, maybe not enough. They also need to limit us a little more, but they're clearly relying on wargamers not being jerks to do that job for them. Smart move, huh?
Also, Fuck the 1/2 of the page layouts. That really Smarts, G-dub.
