@Lord-Marcus I could use one too! All this 8th Edition talk makes me hungry.
On topic, I've got some a article to rant about! Missions. They've released the "Only War" mission, which is the "default" mission in the basic rules. Format is very similar to 7th edition mission rules but there's a few interesting quirks.
The Armies is worded kinda similarly to AoS and says "You can include any models in your army" and is followed by the caveat about having units with less than the minimum required models. This would seem fairly outrageous, but Power Rating keeps it pretty reasonable.
One thing that feels REALLY weird is that you set up terrain and objective markers before knowing what the mission is, but I don't think it's game ruining. Just new. Objectives are pretty basic. Slay and Secure is your standard "hold objectives" type mission with bonus points for slaying the enemy warlord. Domination is a cumulative scoring mission - you get a point per objective each turn you hold it. The one I'm not so keen on is Ancient Relic - after deployment one objective is randomly determined to be the "Relic" and whoever holds it at the end of the game wins. My main beef is I just don't like "randomly select" as a thing. It's always tedious and annoying and ends up with weird situations and compromises. It also seems like depending on objective placement the player with the relic on their side is going to have a huge advantage.
Deployment zones are set by dividing the table in half however seen fit and players alternate deployment, deploying one unit at a time. Personally I much prefer this to "your army then my army". Models can't be within 12" of the enemy deployment zone, so the No-Mans-Land in the middle still exists.
We see
Power Level in play for the first time. You add up each player's power and whoever has the lower power level is the "Underdog". Depending on the power gap between players the Underdog gets a number of one-use "Command re-rolls", which can be used to reroll any single dice roll at any point. The Underdog also automatically gets
First Turn and if both players have the same number of
Victory Points, the Underdog wins a "Minor victory".
The
Battle Length is five Battle Rounds (here's that term again!) or until one player has no models left. No random game length (yay!). The
Victory Conditions are simply whoever has the most points or has slain all their foes wins a "Major Victory". No draws here!
The main thing I took away from this is the whole Power Level thing. Theoretically you could have both players with equal points but one player with a lower Power Level, and I feel like these little boosts could help balance the scales. But who knows, it might be as wildly variable as points in 7th and end up a pointless number nobody bothers with. I like it though, and will probably use Power Level for army building instead of Points unless playing in a competitive environment.
In the same article GW have also said the rulebook will contain 3 Open play missions, 6 Narrative missions (complete with unique stratagems), and 12 Matched Play missions (6 Eternal War and 6 Maelstrom of War). With the free core rules and the main rulebook you've got more than double the number of missions available in the 7th ed rulebook! I like this.
There's also the faction focus article, this time about Orks. Nothing new really, but much like Tyranids it seems Orks will rely on gaining bonuses from large numbers and supporting characters.
The rest is just general bad-translations nothing paticularly noteworthy.
