The Horus Heresy

[Primarch]

Well, I now have one game of HH2.0 under my belt (and a solid win for my Word Bearers too).

My takeaways from the game are:
- It plays very smoothly. From setting up terrain to tallying up VP took about 3 hours for a 1500 point game, despite having only read the rules once. I spent a lot of time double checking stats and USR's, plus there was a bit of time spent chatting.
- The books are REALLY heavy!
- Reactions are awesome. Not having to just grin and bear it while your opponent guns you down is great. Being able to return fire when you get shot, or overwatch when charged means there is a lot more to the decision-making process that goes into which units fire at which targets.
- We rolled a 'kill your opponent' style mission objective, so objective holding troops weren't a major concern. My 20 man tactical squads were still very tough targets. The lack of widespread AP3 weapons mean marines can definitely take a lot of firepower to put down.
- Contemptors are great, high toughness (7) and a good save (2+/5++) makes them very hard to take down. They can also move at a fair pace too.
- AP2 melee weapons that strike at initiative are a must. AP3 is good, but being able to kill terminators fast is pretty useful.

Overall, I really enjoyed the game.

[Primarch]

GW just posted the first Exemplary Battles pdf for 2nd ed. Here.
The Exemplary Battles series is a set of free to download optional missions and a new unique unit for one of the legions, in this case Word Bearers. Fingers crossed they update the older pdfs to version 2 soon.

The 30K forums I frequent seem pretty positive about the new edition, with one exception. Fury of the Ancients is being universally panned as being the most broken thing in the game right now. Currently Contemptors are the hot thing right now. Versatile, tough and cheap, most of the hard counters to it cost way more, both in terms of points and real world money.
There are probably other over/under priced things in the game, but an army of (effectively) unstoppable dreadnoughts is apparently the "I win" option until we get some kind of balance patch.

[Jye Nicolson]

That sucks because I absolutely want to run an all dread army, but I don't want it to be non-interactive.

[Primarch]

That sucks because I absolutely want to run an all dread army, but I don't want it to be non-interactive.

As cool as that sounds, I have no idea what I could do against that. Maybe run an all dread army of my own?

[Primarch]

WarCom has issued the updates for all of the units missing from the Libers.
https://www.warhammer-community.com/202 ... downloads/
The legacy pdf runs to 100 pages and includes 40K style terminators, land raiders, box-noughts and baneblades amongst other things.
There is also a second pdf that updates a bunch of the free rules, from the run up to the new edition, to V2.0

[Jye Nicolson]

The terminators being troops is neat! I think I'd still like to run mine as Varagyr instead but seems good either way. The Thunder Hammer/Storm Shield option is always nice, and I have at least one Assault Cannon termie that otherwise wouldn't get a run.

Box dreads not having axe/shield is sad but that was probably always wishful thinking. I'm not sure any of the ones I have painted already make a lot of sense (if it's not axes it's claws, and Bjorn is notably supposed to be alive at this point), but I have one more to build at least.

Attack bikes being in is a sweet bonus, since they're quite good in 40K.

[Primarch]

The terminators being troops is neat! I think I'd still like to run mine as Varagyr instead but seems good either way. The Thunder Hammer/Storm Shield option is always nice, and I have at least one Assault Cannon termie that otherwise wouldn't get a run.

The troops thing isn't really a big deal. They aren't Line, so they can't hold objectives. Plus they have the support squad rule, so they can't be your compulsory choice for troops.

Box dreads not having axe/shield is sad but that was probably always wishful thinking. I'm not sure any of the ones I have painted already make a lot of sense (if it's not axes it's claws, and Bjorn is notably supposed to be alive at this point), but I have one more to build at least.

You could run the shield/axe combo as dual close combat weapons I guess. The Wolves, (and the Blood Angels) don't get their Chapter-specific Box-nought options from 40K, but you should be able to figure something out. I will be using the model below for my own VI Legion, counting as a Flamestorm Cannon and a Gravis Power Fist.

[Jye Nicolson]

The troops thing isn't really a big deal. They aren't Line, so they can't hold objectives. Plus they have the support squad rule, so they can't be your compulsory choice for troops.

Yeah I'm mostly thinking with 40K brain, where the Elites slot runs out very, very fast.

You could run the shield/axe combo as dual close combat weapons I guess. The Wolves, (and the Blood Angels) don't get their Chapter-specific Box-nought options from 40K, but you should be able to figure something out. I will be using the model below for my own VI Legion, counting as a Flamestorm Cannon and a Gravis Power Fist.

Nice! I may very well do something similar.

[The Other Dave]

OK, question for the Heresy Lore-Hounds, as my idle musings of 8mm Heresy become reality, thanks to Jus' Super Awesome 3D Printing Emporium.

I know there's room for quite a bit of variation within a given Legion in terms of color schemes and what-not, as "chapters" and other organizational entities exist at the sub-Legion level - like I know the Word Bearers have the Ashen Circle, who wear grey armor instead of red, and so on and so forth.

So, how out-there would it be, lore-wise, for a Death Guard force to be using the pre-Mortarion XIVth Legion Dusk Raiders scheme (that I use for my 40K dudes)? I realize it's probably "extremely low" at best, since as far as I understand it Mortarion took over the legion with extreme prejudice, but as long as it's "very low but non-zero" and not "exactly zero" I'll feel better about going through with it . (I mean, I'm leaning strongly towards "do it anyway," but the future-Historical nature of HH has a powerful pull.)

[Primarch]

It's not a 0% chance by any means. A lot depends on if you are planning a Great Crusade era (roughly 200 year time-span) force or a Heresy era (roughly 10 year time-span) force.
Generally speaking Terran veterans were more likely to take the opposite sides to their Primarch during the Heresy. A group of Terran Death Guard who reverted to their old colours is a simple explanation. Or maybe they just got tired of Morty and decided to go off and do their own thing, looting an old storehouse for armour and gear on their way out the door.
Or maybe they were on secondment to another crusade force and didn't have time to repaint their gear before rejoining the main force and turning traitor.
Maybe they have some battle-honours they want to maintain, or it's a mark of shame after disappointing Mortarion.

Tl;dr - They're your minis, paint them how you like.