Warhammer 40,000

Starter Set The starter set goes live the 17th and is going to be Death Guard Vs. Ultramarines, $120 box. Chaos gets a blob of cultists, a few terminators, a few plague marines, a lord, and drones. Loyalists get 2 tactical squads, a devastator, an assault squad, plus a librarian and a captain. Comes with dice and rulers as well.

In addition, there will be the standard soft cover core rules booklet and a small campaign book. The campaign book has the stats for all the dudes in the box, plus a series of narrative missions that set up the ground floor for the first real story arc of the new edition.

Codex AoS was very much a test kitchen for what to expect of the “New Warhammer 40k”. AoS had a rocky start, but they learned from their mistakes, and recently even AoS has surpassed 40k in some regards.

The battle tome will become the template for the codex, not the other way around. Each dex will get the special army wide rules, 6-12 relics, 6 warlord traits, and 6 psychic powers, only now it’s written that you can chose to ether select or roll on warlord/psychic charts. It will also contain full rules and points for all the old and new units in a given army, and special rules for things like warbands, campaigns, narrative missions and the like.

Formations are back, but they cost points now, and so are decurons, but they will be a lot more flexible and take cues from their AoS counterparts.

Overview 6th and 7th edition suffered from growing pains and an identity crisis. GW spent a good amount of time and money figuring out what they want 8th edition to really feel like, and are using what they learned in 40k 6th-7th edition and AoS V1.0-1.2 to rebuild 40k from the ground up. They want new players to feel less intimidated by the dense lore and setting, but want to keep returning players invested in the storyline. Black library is going to do a soft reboot for some of the new 40k lore books, with a gimmicky “New Warhammer” type flagship launch to, as I said before, laydown a ground floor for the upcoming 8th edition.

This phase will be very familiar to anyone who plays today, but there have been a few tweaks and improvements to the rules.

We’ve already seen the profiles of our miniatures, so we know that we’ll be hitting on a fixed Ballistic Skill (a bit like you do now) and we’ve also seen a little about how weapons work – multiple damage from powerful weapons, and armour save modifiers, for example. Today, we look at some of the other rules of the phase.

When you select a unit to shoot, much like today, they can all fire their weapons at the enemy. You can’t shoot, however, if you Advanced this turn, or if you fell back from combat. (See our movement article for details on these.)

You also can’t shoot if there is an enemy with 1″ of you. The exception to this rule is pistols. Models with these hand-held firearms can shoot at the closest enemy target in the Shooting phase, even if they themselves are locked in combat! This is going to make characters with pistols incredibly deadly up-close.

When picking a target, you won’t be able to shoot enemies that are in combat with other units, much like the current edition. However, you can fall back from combat in your Movement phase, allowing other units to fire at your opponent at the expense of your own actions this turn. Expect to see cunning generals deploying their armies in waves to take full advantage of this.

Heavy weapons are worth talking about too. These no longer snap fire if you move, and instead they have a flat -1 to hit modifier for moving units. This applies to all models with heavy weapons, vehicles included. There are a few other factors that affect hit rolls too – smoke launchers on a vehicle, for example, have the same effect of -1 to hit.

The last big change we’re going over today is cover. Currently, cover saves give a blanket save to all units, and one that only comes into effect if the shot would otherwise ignore their armour. In the new Warhammer 40,000, cover is a bonus to your armour save. Critically, this ability often only applies to certain types of unit. For example, only Infantry gain the bonus of cover from a crater.

This interaction works quite nicely with the modifiers to armour saves of certain guns, and means that when someone is trying to hide behind a wall or barricade, if your weapon has a high enough armour penetration, you can shoot them through a wall!

There are also a few weapons that ignore this bonus cover to armour effect – such as those wielded by Chaos Noise Marines and a Leman Russ’ nova cannon.

So, I have a question, I'm planning on doing a minor conversion of my Chaplain and was wondering this:

Anyone know if there's any Space Marine heads with a goatee that aren't molded to the body like the Finecast Black Templar Sword Brethren? Preferably ones with a bionic eye on the left eye as well.