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.
Much like the sixty odd book series the ruleset is based on, Horus Heresy third edition and the changes it brings is quite a lot at first glance. I’d thoroughly suggest checking out our Core Rules review first to start getting your head around the changes. Amusingly, fresh players to the system might have it easier compared with veterans of the Long War. In this article we’re going to look at some of these gameplay changes from the perspective of a player of Horus Heresy second edition.
Significant changes have been made to gameplay. In the first page of the Core Rules, there is a designer’s note stating that while many rules appear to be similar at first glance to earlier editions you should not assume this is the case – this is putting it mildly. I’d thoroughly suggest playing through a few turns at the very least assuming you are coming in with a clean slate reading the book as you go. Most parts of the game have been changed, some of which are far more subtle than others – likewise the impact or reasoning of these changes can sometimes be less obvious at first glance. Let’s take a look at some of the big ones that have jumped out to us.
Weapons now have a Damage statistic. At first this seems like a big one, where the vast majority of weapons only did a single damage. That said, going to a flat damage system achieves similar results, with a bit more granularity without the weird breakpoints of the previous edition.
- Instant Death and Brutal are gone. The previous edition’s solution for dealing with mult-wound models often felt rather inconsistent. Instant Death felt odd with less common toughness values such as on Thallax or Custodes, whereas Brutal often fell into a case of have and have nots.
- This Damage statistic works against hull points. This lets us keep the importance of armour facings of vehicles and being able to penetrate armour with the appropriate weapons and while removing the Vehicle Explodes results on the Vehicle Damage table – something which has led to many a sour moment. More on changes to Vehicles later.
Several interactions have been simplified, some of which could bog down gameplay and be frustrating for players. While some of these may not be as big as some of the other changes, these do add all up and have some interesting broader impact.
- Artificer Armour for sergeants is gone. Praise the Warmaster/Emperor (delete as appropriate). This auto-take from 2.0 is gone, rest in piss. It had many a house rule, and was the textbook example of a mechanic that slowed down the game continually and sometimes led to feel bads. While you can have mixed saves in a unit, once you have nominated a model to take saves on – it does so for all of the attacks until it dies – meaning that people can no longer slowly resolve some damage separately on their character until they are about to die to reduce the amount of incoming damage. You commit or you don’t.
- Scatter Dice are much quicker to resolve. Scatter dice now work like they do in Adeptus Titanicus, which is to say that you roll to hit and only scatter if you fail the hit roll. At which point you normally scatter one dice – no need for two dice with a BS modifier.
This does have an interesting effect of making some blasts the most accurate weapons in the game – which makes sense thematically although could be interesting for balance. As someone who ran big squads of Jetbikes with Plasma cannons, which took forever to resolve this is a great change. - Rerolls in general are much less common. Things that used to grant rerolls like Twin-Linked, Shred or Hatred are gone – no more fishing out and rerolling 30 odd chainsword dice, sometimes multiple times. Likewise, due to the changes to Scatter mentioned above these results are no longer rerollable via Nuncio-Voxes.
- Less measurements are required to be made each turn, impacting several mechanics, although these do have some interesting repercussions.
- Combat Speed (a vehicle going up to half it’s movement) to retain benefits is now gone. Vehicles are faster than ever.
- Rapid Fire is gone, with weapons getting the same number of shots regardless of range. Combined with the removal of Artificer Armour, all of a sudden normal tacticals can unleash a torrent of fire at range. Plasma guns get turned up to 11 and Kraken bolters become rather problematic.
Creating an army list has been completely overhauled. The Force Organisation Chart of old has been binned in favour of a detachment system similar to Legions Imperialis. This system does take a few reads to understand, however the net result is a flexible system which allows you to build most armies that you would have previously – which isn’t to say that they will function the same on the table or at all.
As a result, second edition’s formation system Rites of War has gone – which is likely going to impact those who had built their army and collection entirely around a certain rite, like Day of Revelations for example. While the rites system had some strong themes and flavour it, it came with tradeoffs:
- It explicitly encouraged skew, which can lead to lopsided games in either favour – Day of Revelations games often felt like a coinflip.
- Feeling obliged to play your force’s special Rite of War could feel restrictive – for example as a White Scars player in 2.0, I didn’t have any tanks for most of the edition as neither of my Legion specific rites allowed them. The Legions in heresy were legion – self-contained with companies for all kinds of warfare.
- That said, I’m shit out of luck if I want to score with a bike only army now.
As mentioned in our roundup article, I find the process of list building very time consuming now. I know some people really like optimisation puzzles, but I am not one of them and look forward to an Army Builder dropping to help with this.
The Assault Phase is the most overhauled part of the turn sequence. War has changed – be it from the process of getting into combat, the fighting itself or what follows. As there is a lot to pack up here, we’re going to skim the highlights and cover these more in a later article.
The process of making a charge is much more involved.
- When a unit declares a target it performs a small Setup Move towards it’s target based on it’s stats and some other conditions.
- If it doesn’t make it into touch a small firefight ensues between the two snap shooting at one another – these attacks are snapshots with certain weapon types but there are some ways to up this – such as the Firestorm trait or using the Overwatch Reaction.
- Once this has been resolved, the attacker rolls 2D6 and drops the lowest dice – meaning the curve which various units can make charges is quite different and some units will never be able to make eleven or twelve inch charges, although it does give more consistent results if you’re closer.
- You can no longer intentionally charge multiple units. This is quite a big one, as it makes it harder to lock in multiple units with a massive unit of melee specialists.
- Charge bonuses are no longer the same. You no longer get an inherent additional attack for making a successful charge like in the last couple editions, the amount of dice you’ll be throwing is generally down. If your charge is disordered, you do not get to perform the Setup Move or Volley Fire – although the defender still gets to perform the latter.
- You can charge out of Rhinos now! Charges units which have disembarked are disordered, which is a fair trade off if you can’t afford an Assault Ramp.
Weapon profiles have a lot more granularity. Aside from the earlier mentioned damage statistic, weapons often have modifiers on stats now – for example a Thunder Hammer has a -2 initiative modifier, meaning on a normal marine it will go off at I2 or I3 on an HQ rather than just always going last. This combined with new weapon traits makes for some more choice between weapons.
- Having two single handed weapons no longer gives an additional attack either, this instead is captured in a unit’s profile or paired weapon profile.
Challenges are meant to be memorable standoffs between champions on the battlefield. Quite often this wasn’t the case previously, where gamey situations of feeding chosen warriors into a Primarch would leave them tied up in combat for the whole game. This is no longer the case, as challenges have their own little minigame now.
During this process the fighters pick different stances known as gambits and strike one another – not necessarily initiative order and potentially can have multiple rounds of this through to the death in a single turn. It’s really characterful and addresses some of the feels bads of the old system.
Only units with the Champion type are allowed to take part, so these won’t happen as often which offsets the extra time taken – sergeants won’t be taking part in most cases.
The post combat sequence feels a lot less gamey. Any unit may attempt to disengage from combat – you aren’t necessarily stuck in combat for the whole game. If the loser of a combat breaks and has to fall back, the winner may attempt to reengage – Sweeping Advance is gone, which often felt very gamey.
Unit profiles have more granular mental statistics. Yes, instead of just having a leadership value, units now have separate Leadership, Cool, Willpower and Intelligence statistics like way back in the day or in Necromunda. While this can seem quite bizarre at first, this extra granularity is useful and gives a lot more design depth when they are called upon – using these it is able to make a very potent but cowardly psyker for example.
- Leadership is used for determining when a unit will panic and route – or rally.
- Cool is used to see how the unit performs under fire and resisting all other tactical statuses
- Willpower is called upon when using psychic abilities.
- Intelligence is used when activating various wargear or items or the Mechanicum’s Psy-Arcana.
Off the back of this one of the biggest things we’re glad to see gone is Fearless, which was often gamey as to what it had or how it ignored a number of mechanics. A dreadnought for example is Leadership 12, so if it was forced to fall back due to modifiers it would automatically rally later on.
Several vehicle damage table results and other battlefield effects like Pinning have been consolidated into Tactical Statuses. Tactical Statuses are going to be a huge part of people’s games of third edition. There are four different statuses: Routed, Pinned, Suppressed and Stunned, each of which have different ways of being applied, be it via gamestate trigger or a weapon trait. Two big things to note:
- Statuses can’t be inflicted by weapons or abilities as part of a reaction anymore – avoiding the awkward situation where you got pinned via overwatch.
- Yes, I was a monster who did this a few times with a telepathy librarian until they were left at home and never used again.
- Units with any Tactical Statuses cannot score objectives – there’s quite a few ways to inflict these, so units with high Cool are good to rely on to hold objectives.
- Players will normally have less reactions to use per turn, from a longer list of options. You’ll typically have three reaction points a turn in a full sized game, although these are now allocated for the whole turn. In addition to this a unit which has reacted in one phase cannot do so until the next turn, meaning you will have to be very mindful of which one to use on your key units. There are definitely some reactions that are more useful than others – like the traditional return fire or overwatch, it will be interesting to see how this shapes out. Although we are very glad to see that a heavy weapon squad won’t be able to return fire and perform overwatch anymore!
Reserves have seen a number of changes, some of which invalidate entire second edition armies.
- You can enter from reserves from turn one. This is a great change, particularly with less rerolls available and the game length being only four turns for things like fliers.
Deep Strike Assault is a thing of the past. From our experience, forces which went entirely into reserves such as Day of Revelations often lead to binary outcomes – where one player had battered the other or vice versa. The only way to assault with a unit coming from reserves is if you come from a flying transport – although that has different limitations. - Only one unit can come in via Deep Strike a turn and it doesn’t scatter at all. This combined with the above is a death knell for any Drop Pod Assault armies have, particularly when the game length is only four turns. This is one of the examples where a thematic/heavily skewed list which has been encouraged by the previous Rites of War system just no longer functions.
- I expect to see drop pods of melta squads being used to guarantee them getting within melta range of high priority targets.
- I should mention that free intercepts are essentially gone and are less accurate
Interestingly, the Master of Descent in the Journal Tactica, allows you to drop multiple antigrav units in one go. It’s interesting that GW have shown willingness to be quite flexible with the new rules already with the journal supplements. I wonder if we’ll see more things return in this way. In the meantime, pour one out for your homies with Drop Pod Assault armies.
Vehicles are a lot more resilient and faster than ever.
- The removal of Combat Speed means that vehicles can hit the gas at a moments notice, which is particularly strong in the case of transports.
- Glances now inflict statuses, similar to the previous Vehicle Damage Table. Although if you roll the same result as one which is already present you instead do a single hull point of damage.
- With changes to Rending, AV14 hulls are going to be hard for some things to crack.
- While the Damage statistic can now take away multiple Hull Points, several vehicles have had a few Hull Points added to compensate.
- Vehicles also block line of sight, which feels a bit off if a Predator is stopping you from shooting at a Knight on the other side of it. I’m curious to see how many people play it this way.
- On a short tangent, line of sight rules involving area terrain are quite different and I suspect many people are not going to play them as written, which may impact the balance of certain things – like Raven Guard gunlines.
- Sponsons are now defensive weapons, so watch out for return fire from a Spartan.
A number of changes have been made surrounding scoring. While we could be here all day listing them all and their impact, there are a few key things I’d like to touch on:
- Most units can now control objectives, unless they include any vehicles, cavalry or automata (Mechanicum do have ways to address that last point make automata score).
- RIP Chogorian Brotherhood.
- Units have all sorts of special rules which can impact their scoring:
- Line (X) is now a number of bonus VPs you get for holding an objective with that unit. Line is fairly rare, mostly limited to troops (though not Assault Squads), Veteran Tactical Squads and a handful of Legion-specific units like Grey Slayers. Line can be incredibly important because some objectives are only worth 1VP, but Tactical Squads have Line 2, potentially trebling the reward for holding it.
- Vanguard (X) units, which tend to be things like Terminators and melee troops, instead get (X) VPs either if they kill the last enemy model that is controlling an objective (melee or shooting attacks) or if they chase a unit off an objective in melee. They can get VP rewards higher than the value of holding the objective. Vanguard units can only ever score 1VP for holding objectives as that’s not their job… though of course some objectives are only worth 1VP, meaning it’s no great loss.
We’ve found that quite a lot of Legion-specific assault units have Vanguard but others, including assault units like Templar Brethren and Dark Furies, don’t. We don’t know why.
One of the best uses of your reaction allocation could be moving units off objectives, if facing Vanguard opponents. You score at the end of your turn so there’s no particular reason to stay there after that. If an enemy comes within 12” of your objective-holders in the movement phase you can have your unit react by moving their Initiative away. That means your opponent can’t score Vanguard points for killing them or making them fall back, and it may even keep them alive longer or make the enemy fail a charge, missing out on even scoring the objective
- There are also a few units with Support Squad (X), which caps the amount of VPs the unit can score for holding an objective and provides no benefit. Reconnaissance Squads and Heavy Weapon Squads are both Support Squad (1) for example, meaning you can’t score much by infiltrating onto objectives or covering them with big guns.
War Has Changed
While it’s tempting to judge individual rules changes in isolation, it’s going to be impossible to see the true impact of these changes without many more games under our belt and attending a few events to see what other people get up to.
