I will not be talking about the rules much, I have already talked about them a bit when Games Workshop started posting teasers of the new rules and every other blog and news site has already covered them. I'm mainly just going to talk about my thoughts of the books themselves after I had a quick glance over them yesterday. I haven't read everything yet so I will have missed some bits.
First off there is a lot of fluff in the new rule book. We get all the normal stuff about Pre-Heresy, Heresy and recent history that we get in every rulebook but them we get a faction focus section which gives a decent amount of fluff for each faction in the game including a really detailed description of not just the Imperium but also how it is run and governed and it's hierarchy which I thought was really nice.
I fluff sections also cover an overview of all the recent story advances for people that didn't get campaign books in the last edition. It gives everyone an idea of where the story is going now which is really nice. The bit I liked most though was the Warzone section which talks in a bit more detail about all the main active Warzones. It was really good reading and you can see where GW is focusing at the moment if you read through them.
The basic rules are really well written I thought and easy to understand and are in a small section in the middle of the book (between the fluff and advanced rules). The only thing I might have done is moved these pages to the very front of the book, or given them a different colour page edge so you can see them easily while the book is closed to help you find them since they are the most important bit and being tucked in the middle of a massive book they could be hard to find. The advanced rules all come within either one of the 3 ways to play, in the missions or in the included expansions like Cities of Death and Stronghold Assault. It is great to get these included so you can play them straight away instead of waiting for expansion books later.
I really liked the section on Narrative play, I thought I'd carry on just playing Matched games but the Narrative options look really fun and have a lot of missions where one side has a clear advantage over the other, some even say one force should be at least twice the size of the other. I like the idea of using it and playing games with a little more story than just 2000pts meat grinder. There are also rules including for doing a number of different types of campaigns to link your games together which I thought were really nice.
I really like the new Faction Keywords, it makes list building more interesting since most units have 3 or more keywords and an army only has to share one common between them. It means I could build a legal Imperial army with a mix of Guard, Sister of Battle, Inquisition and multiple Space Marine chapters all in the same detachment to play as an Imperial Crusade or something like that, but because most abilities now only affect certain keywords instead of just saying "friendly models" there would be much less synergy in an army like this than there would be if all my army had the Imperial and Flesh Tearers keywords.
There were a few things I did see which weren't great but might change by the time the Codex comes out. For a start Blood Angels still don't get access to lots of the stuff vanilla Marines get, I don't mind them not getting all the new Dreadnoughts or Special Terminators because we get units they don't but we still can't take a Landspeeder Storm and they have been around for years now. Another issue I saw was that we can no longer Drop Pod Dreads so it will be harder for them to keep up with fast moving armies.
Like I said this is just a placeholder so I am not judging until a real Codex comes out which might fix all those issues. It lets you play with any existing army already and the new Datasheets are really easy to read and use in game because weapon profiles are there with the unit for any loadout they can take so in game you when you activate a unit find the unit and you can see all the weapons you could have equipped right there.
One change to the lists I didn't like was a lot of model that used to be part of units being taken out and made their own entry. With Company Champions, Apothecaries (Blood Angels already had those separate but now everyone does) and Ancients (standard bearers) all Elite choices it really makes the competition for those slots of the Force Organisation Charts extremely high. Luckily some of the new FoC's offer extra slots in places so you have more options but I can still see models I used to run together getting left because I just don't have a slot for it any more.
Overall I really like the books, especially the Rulebook. It isn't split into 3 like 7th but it still has everything you need and some really well written fluff which is the main thing I look for in a book like this, if I just wanted rules I'd prefer a smaller more compact version like the one I brought for Malifaux.
Most importantly for most players in seems is that Games Workshop seems to have forgotten that they basically pretended Squats don't exist for the last 4 editions and they are mentioned in the new rulebook as if they are still an abhuman race within the Imperium...could they be the new faction we were promised and Super Space Marines was just a bluff? Probably not but a man can dream.
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