8th Ed. Only the 8th...

Hello all! I've made a post in the Introduction section.

But essentially my gaming group in Sydney, Australia was based primarily around Horus Heresy narrative events. Over the years we've branched out a bit into Adeptus Titanicus and dabbled with Necromunda.

But over the last year many of us have started collecting 8th edition armies. We had a small series of relaxed events with 1000, 1600, 2000, and 2400 point games. I've enjoyed building up my lizards so much I now consider it my primary focus. And I never even played 8th until 2021!

Here's a sneak peek at my army- the council of characters leading my 1600 point force:

 

Fantastic paint job and great choice of gaming system!

Take a look at the first page of this thread and tell me where I should slot you into knighthood!

 

Just added @Padre as a Knight!

Nice one matey!

 

Thanks for the invite! I still love 8th and play it when I get a chance.

 

I would humbly request entrance to the order. My main game is 8th although to my shame I must confess a love of 7th edition Fantasy, Horus Heresy and Mordheim. The poorly written Tomb Kings book is the main reason I don't play more 8th, that and a serious lack of opponents. Inner Circle Knight is the goal of my quest.

 

But of course! Welcome brother to the Inner Circle of the Knights of Eight!



I totally understand the point on the Tomb Kings book. They're such awesome models with fantastic fluff, but are let down by their rules. But.. Being able to have an army of non-bad guy, Egyptian undead?!?! Yes please!

 

They are what got me into fantasy. I loved the 6th edition book and as I say constantly, they are IMO the most balanced book GW ever released. Thanks to that book being so poorly done they were shelved for most of 8th and my Empire, Greenskins, Skaven and Dogs of War were my mostly used armies. High Elves were too easy as were my Dark Elves while Beastmen were fun but hurting as an army by this point. Amusingly that's why I sold my Dark Elves and Beastmen and am in the process of selling my High Elves. Dwarves and Lizardmen are also fun. Can you tell I had more money before marriage? Well that and building and painting armies fir others and being paid in models lol!

 

Those look great!

 

You should feel no shame toward appreciating 7th Edition Fantasy, if it wasn't for certain overpowered army books the Edition would have been fine (but then the same can be said for 8th ), and if 6th Edition books are used with it it's fine anyway. On the contrary, I'm pleased there are still some other appreciators of the 2006-2010 edition out there. I set up a thread to discuss non-8th Editions of Fantasy here if you're interested in some 7th chat. It's in need of some additional contribution!

Also there's nothing wrong with Mordheim at all, the original Fantasy skirmish ruleset is something I should consider looking into - as I have the models for it and @Warden's Mordheim batreps look so appealing, it's a no-brainer!

I am in the process of completing an erratum for the 8th Tomb Kings book that gives it a power-up to compete with the armies that had later and more favourable book releases. I'll tag you when it's done and I'd be most interested to hear your views on it.

Sad to hear you sold your Beastmen and threw away your chance for membership in the Coven of Lustrian Beastlords .

I could have helped you there too with my exploration of different ways to play the True Children of Chaos - as well as the 7th book with Marks from Glottkin I am planning a list using the 6th Edition Beasts of Chaos book with an erratum written by EEFL's own KevinC, and a full-on 8th Edition book for Beastmen is in the pipelines. As you're still a Beastman fan even though you've sold your army, I'll still tag you when I have completed it, if you'd like to provide your own feedback.

 

Thank you! The irony of 7th edition for my was that the main armies I ended up playing at the time were the Tomb KIngs and Wood elves, both obviously were 6th ed books! The selling of armies was mostly due to the death of the game in my area, I had been so close to having every army as a playable force and then they blew up the world. Beastmen went to a friend who still plays them, Dark Elves went to ebay as did the Chaos Dwarves and Ogres. Chaos Daemons and Chaos Mortals sit on a shelf and wait for me to get motivated to paint them, sadly the Daemons are on borrowed time.

Tomb Kings are what got me into the games as I previously mentioned and as an experiment my group and I used the 8th book in a 7th ed game, only the no charge with magic and tunneling was changed to 7th ed standard. I still missed the old magic however the monsters were amazing! a sphinx that str 3 can't hurt! I had so much more fun and the army could hold it's own and then some. Not DoC level strong but it was really fun. I look forward to you errata. One big issue I always had in 8th was that the Tomb Heralds and Necrotect were practically useless. The necrotect in particular was annoying as it was a cool idea but as it was usually killed before it's benefits came into play I stopped even looking at it as a choice. I am a dual casket user and would like to hear your perspective on the working of the light of death. By rules it can only affect a unit once per turn however this seems like sloppy writing IMO as it looks to be intended to stop the individual casket from double hitting a unit and not a separate one. In my group they allowed the second casket to work but outside of us we went with only once as people thought it was overpowered...usually VC armies .

 

@shattershell Wow I love that colour scheme! I wish my priest looked half as good xD

For the thread itself: Even when I played I only played a little. Had a friend group whom I played with (around 3-4 ppl) and had a tournament here and there. But mainly we played for fun. Started around 6th ed and followed the rules from there. Needless to say we gravitated to 8th ed. at the end and stuck with it for a long time. (6th and 7th I played only few games in total and I played Skaven at that). I picked up LM at the end of 7th, start of 8th and couldn't complain.
When 9th age came around, we tried to swap, but internally played only few games. I also attended 2 or 3 tourneys of 9th (as people locally only play AoS, 40k and 9th age).
So you could say I like 8th the best, but feel like 9th is more balanced and competitive but less fun and homogenized to the core (every army feels the same).

Lets do 50/50 between 8th and 9th then .)

We haven't played for a year or two, but just last month we discussed a possibility of playing a tourney among our group, rules yet to be determined .) (8th, 7th, possibly 6th? Would mean a LOT of rule-checking though)

 

Fantastic!

Welcome to the Knights of Eight as a Questing Knight!

 

And so the Order grows...

 

And it isn't even an exhaustive list. There are a couple of forum members who we know to dabble in 8th edition but who have not put their name down.

 

Actually went through and finally read this thread (a bit late of course )

I enjoyed your post! I never cared for hordes (except for maybe skaven and orcs), I like several medium-ish units of saurus moving up the field instead of one massive blob.



Personally I grew up on 6th edition WFB and super loved that game. Played tons of games vs my brothers Wood Elves and Beastmen. Mostly with my Lizardmen of course, as I didn't truly start getting into my Bretonnians until just as the Old World ended We played many games of 7th and 8th before the world truly ended but never made the jump into AOS.

If my brother and I were ever to play a mass-battle Warhammer game again (haven't in years since we don't live near each other anymore), we would certainly play 8th so he can try out the updated Wood Elf rules that we never had a chance to play with, so he can bring his four Treemen onto the battlefield






.....THAT BEING SAID MORDHEIM IS AWESOME!



...and surprisingly so is Blitz Bowl!



Likely we will probably limit ourselves to more skirmish level games? They are fun, easy to re-learn on the fly, don't take four hours to play, and you don't need to transport a whole army to get games in. I see us playing these games more often in the future than 8th due to this convenience.

We are still very interested though, and plan to have a game with all his treemen and cavalry vs my Council of Slann someday too


....so I guess put me down as a Questing Knight?

 

DONE!!!!

Welcome, brother, to the Knights of Eight!!!

 

I find this interesting, because 8th feels more competitive and homogenised compared to 6th and 7th, where some races had unique ways of casting spells and resolving Miscasts and all had mostly race-specific Magic Items. Indeed it's rather ironic that 9th Age continued the trend that 8th started. I hope that TOW may reverse this and make each race more different and exciting to play compared to the others.

 

As someone new to 8th over the last year, I'm finding it really enjoyable and flavoursome. It's not perfect, though. I do miss the delightful number of factional magic items I remember from playing 6th as a teenager. But that's more than balanced by the extra cool units now available. There were no Bastiladons or Troglodons in 6th!

8th might be more "competitive" in some ways... But I'm not sure. I play with a good group of friends who value modelling, painting, terrain, and narrative/theme. We enjoy discussing tactics, item combos, and list building, but aren't actually competitive. We also organise non-tournament friendly events where we encourage other attendees to prioritise making lists that will be fun for people to play against. These events also have a compulsory fully painted requirement. We tend to attract people who recognise that devising some brutally efficient list isn't particularly challenging or rewarding. Especially compared to having the spectacle of high standard armies on glorious terrain, having good banter with a chill opponent who isn't arguing over everything every rules interpretation dilemma!

I do agree that pursuit of "gameplay balance" can make a game feel a bit bloodless. From what I hear 9th Age is a little like that. Not sure. I hope The Old World doesn't go in that direction.

But ultimately I think it's most important what the attitude of your gaming community is. So far in my area we've managed to cultivate a nice vibe (originally in the 30k Horus Heresy system, but expanding to other games such as 8th). If any of your happen to be based in Sydney Australia, join us! Google Mournival Events!

Sorry for the little ramble there, but I just find this talk of different editions very interesting. Not sure if I have a typical 8th ed experience starting in 2021 with a friendly narrative/hobby focused group!!

 

Without a doubt the additional units are the best thing about 8th, but I do think it's a shame that GW sacrificed some of the discrepancies in magic and most of the race-unique magic items in order to achieve that, to me that feels a little lazy, as if their intention with those moves was purely to speed up army book development at the cost of some of the fun.

I agree that if everyone just focuses on having fun and building armies that feel right with regards to the lore, 8th does work out to be balanced, and I applaud you and your group for adopting this approach, though from my perspective at least, having played 8th since not long after it came out, it looks as though 8th is the most easily abused by powergamers, with infantry horde deathstars, Monstrous Cavalry, 'laser-guided' Cannons, nuke spells, some particularly powerful Magic Items and characters and the movement of some Special units to Core being particularly exploitable. Ideally I would like TOW to enforce some additional limits to discourage this kind of behaviour, but of course nothing too drastic because, as you and others have rightly said, we don't want all the fun and faction uniqueness to be sucked from the game.

 

I'm not very experienced with 8th, but I'm pretty certain you're right that 8th is particularly prone to being abused by power gamers for the reasons you stated.

Now I think of it I did have a 2000 point game earlier this year with against Dark Elves. The guy running the Delves is a generally lovely guy, a really friendly and cheerful presence with good hobby skills when it comes to getting cool painted armies on the table. However he doesn't quite *get* the vibe of our events!

The game was basically his hyper-efficient Pegasus-mounted Sorceress devastating my two big Saurus blocks with Purple Sun of Xereus over and over. Adding in some bolt thrower and crossbow shots, all my poor lizards were wiped out at the end of turn 3 in exchange for less than a dozen Dark Riders....

( ._.)

It was an interesting and thankfully brief window into the crazy competitive 8th edition meta people discuss as being prevalent around 2014. I didn't mind it too much at the time. But if ALL my games were like that, I might not have such a rosy vision of 8th edition as a fun sandbox for themed armies and narrative battles!