The new edition of the Horus Heresy is here, and there’s no better time to dive into playing the terrible battles of this dark age. With a full rules revamp, a new starter set and a plethora of army books all dropping at launch, we’re diving in to give you our first impressions of the new edition, hitting the highlights of what’s new, what’s interesting and what’s worth playing in third edition Heresy.
Before we get started, thanks to Games Workshop for sending these over for review.
I don’t know if I’ve ever witnessed a product launch more filled with drama. There’s been a lot of hearsay on the internet, a lot of blurry pictures on Facebook Marketplace, a lot of people promising to burn books or boycott things. We’re finally here on review day, after a wild time of speculation and uncertainty in the community fed by leaks.
I’ll be blunt with you, dear reader, I’m worried about being too nice in this review in case people start being rude online. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve lost models too (70 of em by my count) but I’m still excited about 3rd edition. Some wargear options might have gone but nothing really has changed. Ultimately everything is still the same as it was, if not more so, but completely different.
This ruleset is poorly written and complicated, but contains a blistering, joyful space where play can and will occur. Whoever wrote these rules was clearly considering not the neatest solution, nor the simplest one, nor even the best, but instead the largest solution, the one most interested in narrative flavour. The style of a lot of modern rulesets is to fashion a negative space surrounding the rules where narrative can occur, but the size and complexity of this ruleset force narrative onto you in a way that feels impossible to escape. There’s tons of story-supporting mechanics, from Challenges to Tactical Statuses to overhauled List Building. This isn’t a game just interested in meat and potatoes, it’s a book investing in giving every player a hundred ways to make the most confusing and incredible roast dinner possible.
Of all the things in the world you could compare it to, I think this new edition is most like the Horus Heresy book series. Specialist Games Studios has delivered a labyrinthine, sprawling spectacle of hundred book-long badly organised genre fiction, with massively variable quality, no clear reading order and potential beyond comparison for good times. At moments you go, “huh?”, and at other moments you go “hell yeah!”, and occasionally Nassir Amit shouts “die, traitor!” as you smile like a proud child at their dad’s third wedding.
This new edition of Horus Heresy is a maximalist display delivered with bravado (and very little polish) that you should do your best to get involved in if you ever had a childhood space marine army and want to see them kill each other in large numbers. This is not only the most Horus Heresy that Horus Heresy has ever been, but it’s probably also the most WARHAMMER that Warhammer has ever been. If that sounds like fun you’re going to like this, and if it sounds bad then you’re going to hate it.
Let’s get started and break it all down!
The Video Version
If you’d like to watch a video version of our Heresy third edition coverage, we’ve got you covered here:
Exciting Changes
Some of this is old news from previews and Warhammer Community, but I wanna hit some top line bullet points in descending order of importance:
- The biggest change to core gameplay is how statblocks and characteristics are generated and used. It’s same old, same old on the basic level: Attacks, Strength, Toughness and whatnot, but every weapon, statblock and special rule has been rewritten, with weapons having modifiers (or setting) Strength, Damage, Initiative and Attacks, and having a fixed AP. Instant Death is gone and Damage characteristics are in. Lots of heavy weapons have 2 (or even 3 damage), but most non-vehicle units don’t have more wounds than before. Stuff is going to die much faster.
- Another huge change is the charge process, involving a short Set Up Move shuffle that varies from 1” to 6” depending on Movement and Initiative. This is followed by everyone doing Volley Attacks and Snap Firing (hitting on 5s with new BS rules) Assault weapons at each other, before a final, shorter charge (the higher of 2 dice). You’re still going max 12”, but the new curve massively favours short charges and hates long ones. A normal marine unit can charge a max of 9”.
- There’s been some streamlining around little pain point rules. Most re-rolls are gone. Blast attacks roll to hit and scatter if they fail. Artificer Armour on sergeants is gone. Night fighting is gone. Rapid fire is gone (most rapid fire weapons just have 2 shots now). Extra attacks for charging and 2 weapons are gone. The only thing I’ll miss here is the last one, as most stuff has less attacks now.
- Rogue Trader / New-romunda mental stats have arrived and they’re fun! They’re mainly used for special rules, but also to avoid Tactical Statuses. Think getting Pinned was bad? They’ve broken it down into Pinning (no movement or charges), Stunned (no Reactions) and Shaken (shoot with Snap Shots). All of which mean you can’t score objectives , attack at Initiative 1 in combat and can never gain benefits for being stationary. These suck, and Routed sucks even more. Fearless and Stubborn are also far less ubiquitous, meaning combat resolution and morale matters much, much more.
- The new system for Challenges rocks, but is massively noodly and wordy. Expect epic duels between titanic heroes that feel slightly less epic due to the amount of times you’ll need to check the rulebook.
- Reactions have been streamlined. You only get two per turn at 1.5k to 3k game size (+1 if you have a model with Master of the Legion), rather than one per phase plus extras. Return fire stays but Evade is gone. Withdraw and Advance have been consolidated into Reposition (Move your Initiative). Set to Defend is gone, and Overwatch lets you Volley Fire your weapons as not Snap Shots and with non-assault weapons. There’s also a few advanced reactions, and additional ones for each Legion
- Vehicles won’t be instantly killed by an explosion anymore! Multi damage means the amount of hull points has gone up. For example, Rhinos and preds are at 5 not 3, with Land Raiders at 8 not 5, and Knights at 10 not 8. Penetrating hits do the weapon’s Damage to Hull Points, whereas a Glancing Hit does a random Status. Battlesmithing units are now way more important, as they let your tankier vehicles regain Hull Points and remove their highly penalising Statuses.
- Most things can score objectives now and you always score at the end of the turn. There are a few special rules which interact with this: Line (X) gives X extra points when the unit scores the objective, Vanguard (X) gives X points when you kill an enemy unit on an objective, Support Squad (X) means they can score at most (X) points on an objective, Expandable (X) means they can only give up X points if killed and Heedless means they can’t score at all. Scoring at the end of turns
- Flyers have been completely reworked, having a series of available Combat Missions which often bring them successively on and off the board to do specific jobs. Flyers disappear at the end of the player turn once their combat mission is done, and you really need good Skyfire weapons to intercept them, otherwise they’re very different to interact with.
- Transports are nuts. Combat/Cruising Speed is gone, meaning your Rhino can go 12”, then the unit can do a full move out of it and then do a Disordered Charge. Transports have gotten more expensive across the board to compensate for this, but they feel a LOT more useful.
- Reserves and Deep Strike are reworked, with each unit rolling a 3+ to arrive in the Reserves sub-phase. Units can charge out of Outflank and normal Reserves, but not Deep Strike. Massed Deep Strike Assault is gone, along with its Pinning, daisy chaining or random disordered arrivals (if you can’t deploy legally you just die). Deep Strike is no longer a dominant, high risk strategy for assault units, instead becoming a strategy for drip feeding precision strikes for short range shooting and objective stealing.
- Titans have new rules, with different armour classes and hull points for different locations, which have their own critical damage results. Titans absolutely rock and now seem very, very fun to play against and play. We’ll let you know with a test game.
- List building has been completely redesigned from traditional force org charts. This is complicated, but gives a lot of flexibility, maybe even too much! The important thing is that as long as you have enough Command Slots (Centurions or non-Marine equivalents), you can do whatever you want. Rites of War might be gone, but this is a win as most of their force org shenanigan benefits are redundant given how flexible the rules are. You now get all of the fun benefits of taking the army you want without any of the limitations from old Rites of War.
- All new Psychic Powers, with a new Thaumaturgy discipline! These all rock and are weird as all hell. Librarians also appear to get up to 2 each, which rules.
The important thing is that literally nothing has stayed exactly the same. There are two separate callouts in the book making it very clear that you need to read all the rules because of how many changes there are, rather than assuming that something worked the same as you remember it doing in 2nd or 1st edition Heresy, or 7th, 4th, 5th, 3rd, 6th or 2nd edition 40k, which I have certainly done for all my sins and I know you have too, dear gamer.
Writing Style
I really can’t overstate how meaty the writing style of this book is. In my opinion, the writer has a background in (or has been inspired by the style of) non-games technical writing. The book feels most reminiscent of early 2010s corporate knowledge documentation.
Everything is explained in detail. Everything is broken down into thick steps that reference each other. There are a lot of sidebars and what feels like dozens of distinct sub-phases with highly specific orders of operations. Capitalisation feels Rampant and at Times random.
There is a two paragraph section on the use of the humble tape measure amongst 2.5 pages on measuring distances. There’s a really heavy use of examples, and multiple instances where they explain the same rule twice in different sections (and very rarely they disagree).
The comprehensive nature of the writing leads to challenging information flow. The book often explains complicated concepts before they cover basic ideas. For example, differing unit Types and Sub-Types go before explanations of Movement or Shooting, and the full rules for Vehicle, Flyers and Terrain go before breaking down how the turn is structured!
There are a lot of steps to everything. At the moment inside the Assault Phase, we’ve got a moving sub-phase, both sides doing full shooting attacks, a second phase of movement, and only then do we get into combat, which has a separate Challenge system (not just a phase, 5 sub-phases that potentially loop infinitely) inside it followed by actual fighting, then a final Resolution phase followed by morale stuff and sweeping advances.
Special Rules have a neat bit where they explain what they do in brief terms (“Attacks with Shred have a chance of scoring an extra point of Damage”) and then explaining the rule in full, but apart from the reasonably complete index, this is really the only accommodation they have made to make this game easier to understand. The good news is that most special rules appear to be repeated in the Libers, which mean less book flipping! This compares unfavourably to the style used in 40k, where rules are explained simply first off, again slightly more complicated and sometimes a third time in the Rules Commentary if necessary.
Highlights
As always, this is a gorgeous book! It contains tons of engaging lore and lots of Black Book style art, both in-world Black Book photocomp images and those pictures of Space Marines in fun armour we know and love. Specialist Games Studios have always known how to make a good book and this is one!
My absolute favourite change is the new list construction and the new challenge system. Army lists are going to feel more like a cohesive military force. In your Marine lists, Centurions, Optae and Consuls effectively command smaller thematically linked Auxiliary detachments that add on to your core Crusade Detachment. For Marines, it’s worth mentioning that an Optae or Consul lets you take one Auxiliary Detachment, whereas a Centurion commands two, which opens up very interesting list building options.
Your High Command Praetor-equivalents fit into the melee assault role by leading Apex Detachments, elite forces of Command Squads, Veterans and Legion Specific units.
Each Crusade or Apex detachment allows you to take a Prime Trait, which might be:
- A Logistical Benefit unit that can be any single unit from an Auxiliary or Apex detachment
- Upgrade key models Sergeants or Command Models with Prime Sergeant or Paragon of Battle.
- Upgrade a single unit with better mental stats with Combat Veterans
- Upgrade a Command slot to a High Command slot, without allowing you to take the Apex Detachments.
Certain Legions or non-Marine equivalents let you take special Prime Benefits or special Auxiliary Detachments.
You also get an unlimited number of allied detachments, which get less Prime Traits and no access to Lord of Wars, Paragons (read Primarchs), or High Command Slots. The only cap here is 50% of your army’s total points.
The moment I wrapped my head around these army compositions I fell in love with it. While it’s a bit more fiddly, your decisions feel so much more thematic than filling out a force org chart!
My second favourite change is to challenges. Without explaining too much how they work, you basically split your fight into different Gambits which you deploy each round. A swaggering Emperor’s Children Champion might deploy a Feint and Riposte to deny their opponents access to Gambits. A furious Space Wolves Wolf Priest may issue a Flurry of Blows, whereas a hardy Death Guard Biomancer may put their Guard Up. These add a lot of roleplaying to the interesting decisions of combats, and there’s some fun and intuitive combos to defeat your opponents with. The Glory step contributes massively to combat resolution, so even if you don’t kill your enemy the impact on routing is massive.
Each Legion and some special characters also get their own special Gambits outside the core choices, which we’ll cover in the specific Legio reviews.
The Elephant in the Room
A lot of units have gone and a lot of flexibility is gone from the units we have left. The main pain point here is in the Command Slots for the Marines, with many Consuls losing almost all their wargear options. Basically everyone is losing the ability to take stuff like bikes or jet bikes, with the occasional seemingly random jump packs being sprinkled about. This is a bummer. I’m personally going to lose about a dozen lovingly converted HQ models, and that’s a real shame.
The good news is that the upgrades that remain do still cost points, so there will still be variety, and we won’t see every command unit take the same bog standard wargear options. Pour one out to the heroes!
The other good news is that this is ‘for now’, and we may see expanded content replace these. A bunch of the stuff introduced in the various Campaign Supplements (Legiones Auxilia, Overseers, Decurions, Demon Engines and more) are just built into the base game now. We may see a later jetbike focused campaign, or one that re-adds Destroyers or Scouts. Anything is possible!
Room for Improvement
It speaks to the quantity of new and interesting ideas in 3.0 that the things I’m most disappointed in are where nothing has changed.
The lack of “Small Heresy” formats is a real shame. While there are less reactions at a smaller points level, the game still needs more to effectively onboard. We’ll probably be writing one here at Goonhammer before long, but I think it’s going to hurt the game, and I think GW will sell a lot of big boxes that bounce off the brains of the people who try to play this game for the first time. It’s going to be a rough onboarding process too, and we’re all going to have to go through it (not matter if a new starters or a decade long veteran) because of the number and complexity of sweeping but subtle changes.
The missions are also a disappointment. There’s 3 of them and they are all subtle variations on the Siege of Cthonia Missions from 2.0. While I’m happy there’s nothing with Kill Points, they’re on the low end of complexity, imagination and interest for a modern wargame, especially one as interested in big ideas as the rest of this book.
The good news is this will easily change with supplements, and because points scoring is basically the same you can easily substitute a 1.0 or 2.0 mission, on the understanding that more points will be scored due to bonuses Line and Vanguard.
The final worry is that lethality is way up (at least according to the vibe from our test games). We found a lot of stuff was dying, with traditionally hard to kill units (terminators and dreadnoughts) vanishing under the weight of multi-damage weapons. A lot of VP were scored by Vanguard killing units on objectives, and we found it important to use the Reposition Reaction to move units off objectives on the enemy turn to avoid giving up points for Vanguard, then allowing them to move back onto objectives to score at the end of their player turn.
Final Thoughts
This is the start of a series of articles we’ll be running about Horus Heresy 3.0; you can find our landing page for all of those here.
We’re cautiously optimistic about what this new edition brings in the Goonhammer office, for all the challenges we’ve come to expect from a Specialist Studios Game. We’re very curious to see where Games Workshop goes next with follow up supplements.
If you’re in the UK, come join us in Leicester at the September Goonhammer Open, where we take these new rules for a spin, and take the opportunity to play against some of the writers from Goonhammer dot com.
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