In our final round table interview, Adam and Eddie talk to Warhammer Studio designers Josh and Kenny about the rules that make the new edition of Warhammer 40,000 the best yet.
We’ve seen some of the fascinating changes coming to the game already, like the new hidden rule and objectives changing to cover entire terrain areas, and now’s the chance to hear how the designers came up with some of the new edition’s landmark adjustments. Here are a few of our favourite bits:
Detachments
Josh: For us, one of the things that we looked at through 10th edition was that the detachment had to be very broad. You got one detachment for your army, and it was trying to position a narrative, but also it often meant that you're trying to make it work for a whole army and certain rules didn't cross over very well in that respect.
So what we've now looked at doing is there still are army-wide detachments if you liked that style, and you have an overarching theme that you want to play, but we also want to give you choices where, if you have certain favourite unit types or certain favourite play styles, you can pick a detachment that's smaller, and it'll give you key ways of playing those units.
The Language of Rules
Josh: We've seen it at events, when you'd go to events and people go, "Oh, the charge is eight inches." and you'd go, "Is that eight inches on the dice roll and I'm actually in range, or do you mean I need to roll a nine?" So what we've unified now is that all these measurements are done base to base, so when you make a Charge, it’s exactly the same as when you're thinking, "Am I in range of shooting?", or when I want to move.
It's the same style of measurement, so we don't have that switch between the two systems. Sounds really minor, but it will hopefully clean up when people are talking about speaking in a common language.
Kenny: I think this leads to a core direction we had this edition too, that we really wanted to make sure that the rules were doing the best job they could so you didn't get upset with the way that your opponent communicated with you. If I go, "Oh, it's eight inches." and then you roll and you go, "Oh, well you actually needed a nine because what I was saying is that the distance was eight,” you're like, "Oh, well that's annoying."
So we want to clean that up wherever we can in the rules to make sure that you are playing the same game. When you go, "Thursday, 2,000 points, you want to play Warhammer?" you're both coming with the same expectation.
Rolling Dice
Kenny: So, one of the things that we observed a lot in the Attack sequence of the game when we were watching people play is that depending on players' knowledge of the game, they would either just fast roll everything – which is actually not the way that the rules were built, it's just a thing that we all do because it makes it faster to play – or know the moments you actually need to stop doing it and then slow down the rolls to then make sure that you get the most advantageous situation.
So we've actually made fast dice rolling core this edition … and there's a fun kind of narrative consequence that comes from that system as well, which is the fact that characters with good defensive profiles live longer. And so you have these really cool moments in the middle part of the game, sometimes where a few characters are running around and getting into fights with each other because they survived the combats with ranged attacks during those turns.
The Dominatus Deck
Kenny: So that is Dominatus, and what it's really there for is to allow players to show up to, let's say, a weekend get-together or an event with their normal army and play a number of linked games. So we took the elements that we really liked from Crusade, but tried to take out all the homework.
Now, what you can do is go like, "Oh, I have this really cool army. I'm going to show up with, you know, some of my buddies or I'm going to go to an event. They're going to run a campaign to fight for the fate of Armageddon." That's what that box specifically does. And after each game, I'm going to either get battle honours or I'm going to get little points of experience that are, like, one-turn-use elements.
And you use those to then basically get new options for your army as you go. Then you see who won, who basically took over for the battle, and at the end you can reset or you can continue to go. So if you want to turn it into a league situation where every Tuesday you show up, play Dominatus, and get some new things, you can either run it out quite long or keep it quite short as, like, a two-day thing.
That’s it for our round tables, and that can only mean one thing – pre-orders for Warhammer 40,000: Armageddon are launching tomorrow. Make sure you get your copy by turning up at the right time, which you can check on our handy chart below.
We’ve made a lot of boxes this time around, so as long as you’re there at go-time, you should be fine. To Armageddon!
