2nd ED memories....

[Narf]

to hit modifiers, being behind a wall makes you harder to hit, doesnt mean i hit you then the wall jumps in the way!

overall i'd keep phases we have in 5th, but add back in to hit modifiers, and make IC vs IC and MS vs MS or any cmbination of that combat like 2nd ed, so that it adds more drama. grunts and squads are worked out as now though

some form of in depth vehicle damage would be nice too, or at least reactions that may occur liek the ork trukk rules.

not overwatch though, never liked that, made games boring as no-one ever moved.

and maybe just maybe this new battles book will allow non symectrical missions, you never know

[methodeoin]

Most thing I remember is arguing over things EVERY game. We were in our early teens though so not as laid back and worldly wise as now

Best memories:

1)When I realised most of my wolf army was in charge range so using Ragnars wolf howl. Think it was the equivlent of fleet. Cant remember if they got attack bonuses but it was just a cool moment.

2)Ragnar in general. 4+dodge, throw more wargear on him to make him harder to kill then purposely just mill into as many units as you can!! Didnt he have something like 7 or 8 attacks on the charge?

3) A game where I used a few assasins(it was either 3 or 6) against every chaos space marine miniature my buddy had. Great laugh trying to keep them alive and sow as much carnage before they died.

4) Kicking Calgar into a vortex grenade templete using a bionoc leg. Wonder if that was even legal......still a cool moment though!

5) Necromunda!!!

[Chucklemoney]

The Eldar Harlequin Solitaire.

For anyone who played 2nd ed, I need say little more.

[UncleCrazy]

I miss IG being the best H2H army. I don't miss losing games before they start to virus outbreak.....

[AndrewGPaul]

Squat Ancestor Lords being the most powerful psykers in the game, despite looking like wizened garden gnomes. That was fun, watching the Ancestor Lord demonstrate to some allied Grey Knights exactly how to kill Lords of Change in close combat.

[Fable]

The Eldar Harlequin Solitaire.

For anyone who played 2nd ed, I need say little more.

That character was about 10 different kinds of Ass Whoop.

My favorite memory was in a 6k game against one of my good friends. He won first turn and fired off all 12 Cyclone missles in a single salvo as his opening shot... he also rolled Hit + Misfire which resulted in the spontaneous blast template based krak missile death of about 1500 pts worth of Space Marines. The game was paused for a good 10 minutes so I could collect myself enough to stop laughing.

[Loki73]

LOL that is funny!

[TheDilz]

The Eldar Harlequin Solitaire.

For anyone who played 2nd ed, I need say little more.

The Chaos Lord with Daemon weapon, combat drugs, and D field... need I say more?

WeaponSkill was godly.

[Archangel_Ruined]

The harlequin army - I have eight models, all your bases are belong to us...

[Tethylis]

The Eldar Harlequin Solitaire.

For anyone who played 2nd ed, I need say little more.

When a tooled up one of these with combat drugs & harlequins kiss managed in drop my mates hive tyrant in the 1st turn
I just wish I had a picture of the look on his face

[Archangel_Ruined]

Tyrants were for wimps, it was the carnifex that scared me in 2nd. T8, ten wounds and terminator armour when it was nails, and with that bio plasma attack. The horror.

[Bunnahabhain]

Driving as cheap as possible vehicles into hordes, until they have hit enough of them to explode in a highly impressive fashion...
Great thing is, virtually all the damage results were either irrelevant, caused you to blow up, or to move out of control, so you hit more stuff, so would blow up..

[Phyros]

Recently I had a 2nd Edition game where my 5 man space Marine Assault Squad thought they were a playing in 3rd Edition game and charged a Brood of Tyranid Warriors.

It was a fail moment for the Marines.

[spaint2k]

You see that armament was perfectly legal, though you couldnt fire both in the same phase, so you fired all 12 krak missiles in the first turn with a 6" diameter blast krak missile.

The rest of the game the Wg shot things with his AssCan but would avoid combat like the plague

That combo was a loophole that never even occured to any of my friends because you'd need to cannibalize two models with heavy weapons (or place a bitz order). It was expressly described as "sad" in one issue of White Dwarf as the writers hadn't meant to leave the wording like that.

[Firmlog]

2nd ed. Darkangels. Not specifically strong but...

captain in term armor, autolaunchers, Super plasma gun (can't remember the name had 2 dice for sustained fire), warp generator
tech marine medpac, jump pack and servo arm (for fixin the vehicles)
apothecary medpac
2 predators with lascannons, auto launchers, ablative armor.
2 tac squad, LC, vet srg, blind grenades, medpac, power weapons (in case someone got into cc)
2 speeders with AC and Hb and Autolaunchers (counted as troops cause DA.)
Dread with LC and ML ablative armor autolaunchers
May have had Polymorphine assassin or vindicare?
DA attack bike with autolaunchers and recon pack (almost forgot.)

Medpacs to heal any soldiers that took damage, made the troops like a necron army LOL.
Recon pack, very important, the army needed to go first gave and extra D6 on roll to see who got to go first. And, gave an extra strategy card.
Captain warp jumped in front of a heavy weapons squad, shot them to Sheeite. Then, threw blind grenades from auto launchers on them so they couldn't return the favor.
Speeders moved at max speed, took a -3 to be hit for speed, + -1 for being DA speeders, and suffered no penalty in return due to being DA.

After I shot everything with Auto lauchers and blind grenades blew them so they couldn't be targeted by return fire.

Opponent would get no shooting phase since he couldn't see my army, anyone in blind grenades had to forgo shooting if they moved out of the blind grenades to get back into coherency.

By my turn most of the blind grenades phased out so I had targets again, Repeated first turn until I won.

Undefeated army. Even took on the dreaded Space Wolf cyclone Assault cannon army. The only model left was the leader with the helm or cloak of russ since he never failed his 2+ invuln save... but otherwise took the army to the man.

Vortex grenades were pretty much outlawed by the time I made this army, but I did face them a couple of times, without much problems.

I made the mistake of trying to teach someone 2nd ed with this army, he didn't have too much fun and didn't get into 40k until late 3rd ed.

[Kulgur]

Most thing I remember is arguing over things EVERY game. We were in our early teens though so not as laid back and worldly wise as now

Best memories:

1)When I realised most of my wolf army was in charge range so using Ragnars wolf howl. Think it was the equivlent of fleet. Cant remember if they got attack bonuses but it was just a cool moment.

2)Ragnar in general. 4+dodge, throw more wargear on him to make him harder to kill then purposely just mill into as many units as you can!! Didnt he have something like 7 or 8 attacks on the charge?

3) A game where I used a few assasins(it was either 3 or 6) against every chaos space marine miniature my buddy had. Great laugh trying to keep them alive and sow as much carnage before they died.

4) Kicking Calgar into a vortex grenade templete using a bionoc leg. Wonder if that was even legal......still a cool moment though!

5) Necromunda!!!

Ragnars wolf howl was a triple movement charge for everyone (compulsory for everyone but Long Fangs)

[EvilFuzzyDoom]

Chaos Lord with all 4 marks, terminator armor, blessing of Khorne, Conversion field: 270 points, 2+ save on 2d6 with reroll, 4+ unmodifiable save. He held up an ENTIRE TYRANID ARMY once... and won.

[AndrewGPaul]

Tyrants were for wimps, it was the carnifex that scared me in 2nd. T8, ten wounds and terminator armour when it was nails, and with that bio plasma attack. The horror.

You were doing it wrong. First thing you do is take the 10 point Biomorph that makes it T 9. Lascannon needed a 5+ to wound the ******* thing.

[Ronin_eX]

Don't miss 2nd Edition at all actually... I still play it.

It is the most complete rule set for representing platoon level battles in 40k and it is a great rule set that captures the flavour of the background perfectly.

Some of the things I love about it:

Short ranged fire fights at 8"-12" that don't become assault the next turn. I had a 5-man marine combat squad duking it out with an enemy unit across the way for three turns as we moved additional resources into place to break the stalemate (as rushing across open ground was a quick way to die). You could have real firefights at short range and the only way to break them up was to coordinate your assault with multiple units.

Why 2nd is not herohammer 40k: Thinking his awesome Ork Warboss was too tough to die my friend decides to sneak him up the flank. I manage to get an advance deployed combat squad (another strategy card ) with a meltagun near him and they are set up on overwatch. He moves the Warboss, I fire, his shield generator overloads from the fire and the melta shot gets through, his mega-armour does jack and the only save he gets is the 4+ medi-squig save that he promptly fails. I deal 6 wounds (for comic effect) and his Warboss goes down in the first movement phase..

The little Ork army that probably couldn't: This game was a comedy of errors against another one of my Ork playing buddies. The stars of the game were his Stormboyz and the massive bike squad he took. The Stormboyz squad were tasked with taking my scouts off of a rooftop in the middle of the field. There were stairs but he wanted to drop down on them from above and show them what for.

The first turn they launch into the air and the fun starts. One goes flying off into the sunset and four others scatter off of the roof and land on the ground. One makes it on top but scatters into two of the scouts. He dies quickly due to being outnumbered. Next turn he jumps up on the the rooftop only to have another fly off into the sunset. The two that land die in close combat and the last one scatters off. Next turn the last one makes its morale check and attempts to get on the roof again but scatters off. Last turn of the game he makes another try but like so many before him he puts a bit too much into it and goes flying off the battlefield. Ork unit destroyed and I only did 50% of the damage (to be fair the three that flew off didn't actually die and I didn't get the VP for them).

Meanwhile on the other side of the battlefield the massive horde of boyz marched forward under the watchful gaze of Ghazgkul himself toward my lines while a horde of nine bikes roared toward me. I opened up on them with a terminator squad with an assault cannon and he sees why packing bikes tight is a bad idea as the unit proceeds to start a chain reaction that brings them down to about two bikers in one go. The remaining bikes make a skid turn and attempt to hit the other, less deadly, side of my lines. Their leader (a mech) bares down on my techmarine in the second last turn after most of the advancing horde has been destroyed by concentrated fire) Ghaz has activated the power of the Waaagh! and is immune to damage. The shot from the mech's Kustom Blasta hits... but the conversion field eats it, sending a flash over the battlefield blinding all remaining Orks that can see him. The Master of the Deathwing charges the mech on a bike, punches it and sends it flying backward where it explodes.

Not wanting to add insult to injury we leave the blind, fumbling Ork warboss stumbling around the battlefield as I move my forces over to the objective. When Ghaz comes to the battlefield is empty and his horde is gone, poor ole' Ghaz.

Then there are the usual Vortex Grenade backfires, odd displacer field shifts, epic battles between characters and the rest of the great stuff that happens when playing 2nd Edition. Oh and dreadnought duels, I love an edition where your dreads are actually bad ass and can go toe to toe with large creatures like daemons or other dreadnoughts without going down in one round of combat. The image of two gigantic things ripping the hell out of each other in epic combat is alive and well in 2nd and when your dread stands victorious over the corpse of a Daemon missing its arm and with a jam in its assault cannon you really feel like you earned that kill.

Chaos Lord with all 4 marks, terminator armor, blessing of Khorne, Conversion field: 270 points, 2+ save on 2d6 with reroll, 4+ unmodifiable save. He held up an ENTIRE TYRANID ARMY once... and won.

That is an amazingly bad Nid player right there. o_O

Why didn't he just feed you a line of gaunts, lord knows he probably had enough of them. Even against a non-horde army a small based mini with that much bling is crying out to be held up by a group of 4-5 models. Besides if twinking hard why not go with a displacer field for the 3+? Then again he is still punked by anything with a Vortex Grenade. Lord help him against an Eldar Exarch with a warp spider jump generator and a vortex grenade, he wont have time to scream before getting to meet all the Chaos gods and explain what he is doing back so soon.

One of the plus sides to being able to overspend on characters was that the most effective ways to teach people why they shouldn't were relatively inexpensive (veteran sergeant with vortex grenade in an assault squad is only a cost of +65 points to the squad). If people are relying on one model too much it is very easy to make that one model meaningless while you tear apart their army.

You were doing it wrong. First thing you do is take the 10 point Biomorph that makes it T 9. Lascannon needed a 5+ to wound the ******* thing.

LasCannons were S9 then as they are now so it was still only a 4+ to wound (heavy plasma gun did it on a 3+ though). Using the heavy plasma gun you were reducing its save with a -6 mod and doing D10 damage in one hit (1/10 chance on a one hit kill but chances are you'd need at least two to do the job). One a marine devastator these things hit on a base 2+ out to 72". Not horribly bad odds for taking down a beasty that size I'd say. It was nice having meaningful firepower in 2nd.

[Ronin_eX]

2nd ed. Darkangels. Not specifically strong but...

captain in term armor, autolaunchers, Super plasma gun (can't remember the name had 2 dice for sustained fire), warp generator
tech marine medpac, jump pack and servo arm (for fixin the vehicles)
apothecary medpac
2 predators with lascannons, auto launchers, ablative armor.
2 tac squad, LC, vet srg, blind grenades, medpac, power weapons (in case someone got into cc)
2 speeders with AC and Hb and Autolaunchers (counted as troops cause DA.)
Dread with LC and ML ablative armor autolaunchers
May have had Polymorphine assassin or vindicare?
DA attack bike with autolaunchers and recon pack (almost forgot.)

Medpacs to heal any soldiers that took damage, made the troops like a necron army LOL.
Recon pack, very important, the army needed to go first gave and extra D6 on roll to see who got to go first. And, gave an extra strategy card.
Captain warp jumped in front of a heavy weapons squad, shot them to Sheeite. Then, threw blind grenades from auto launchers on them so they couldn't return the favor.
Speeders moved at max speed, took a -3 to be hit for speed, + -1 for being DA speeders, and suffered no penalty in return due to being DA.

After I shot everything with Auto lauchers and blind grenades blew them so they couldn't be targeted by return fire.

Opponent would get no shooting phase since he couldn't see my army, anyone in blind grenades had to forgo shooting if they moved out of the blind grenades to get back into coherency.

By my turn most of the blind grenades phased out so I had targets again, Repeated first turn until I won.

Undefeated army. Even took on the dreaded Space Wolf cyclone Assault cannon army. The only model left was the leader with the helm or cloak of russ since he never failed his 2+ invuln save... but otherwise took the army to the man.

Vortex grenades were pretty much outlawed by the time I made this army, but I did face them a couple of times, without much problems.

I made the mistake of trying to teach someone 2nd ed with this army, he didn't have too much fun and didn't get into 40k until late 3rd ed.

Hate to tell you this but you were cheating or are really misremembering your list. First you can only mount auto-launchers on Predators and the Dread and they only get a maximum of two volleys of blind grenades for the whole game. Your speeders and the attack bike (and especially the terminator captain) couldn't mount 'em.

So running the captain out and shooting would be met with return fire no matter what you tried (and on average only a handful of kills as well) and without an invulnerable save to pick up the slack when the really big guns hit he would be toast in short order. Not a good plan.

The speeders can't mount auto-launchers at all and need to rely on their speed alone I'm afraid. And when dealing with multi-shot weapons you tend to want to get an angle that allows you to negate cover modifiers on targets otherwise all those shots will do you no good (remember only one roll to hit). So they can't really utilize blind grenades effectively. So while you can sit them back and snipe with them they weren't ideal platforms for it and they couldn't bring their own smoke as a standard option or via vehicle upgrade cards.

The lone attack bike carried no auto-launchers and it couldn't even take blind grenades if taken via the Ravenwing Attack Bike option. So it wouldn't provide any extra smoke to the list. Also I'm looking through my wargear cards and not finding a recon pack or any kind of item that gives a bonus to initiative as well as an extra strategy card. Maybe from a WD but not even the Battlebible has one in there. Sounds overpowered regardless though (but marines already had a good SR so it wasn't hugely needed unless fighting Orks).

The tac squads look fine though the medi-pack did only save people on a 5+ if you could get into base-to-base with them so it wasn't hugely useful to have on that many models, especially the Techmarine who was splitting his purpose way too much. Better to give him some protection as he is on his own a lot and thus very easy to kill.

The preds are fine. Apothecary is fine and the dread is fine. But overall you were packing auto-launchers in that you couldn't possibly have.

You also seem to be misremembering how much scatter was involved with blind grenades and auto-launchers because there was a lot of it. Most blind grenades are aimed at the ground (handheld ones in this case) and as such hit on a 6 only. If this misses they scatter and have a 1/36 chance of being duds (hit and misfire result on the scatter-arty dice) otherwise they will tend to scatter at least 4" in a random direction (and as they are a 2" template that means they are not where you want them to be unless they move directly forward or directly back). So the two blind grenades you are firing will likely scatter and be useless. That is why they tend to be better choices for things like bikers or assault squads where more than one guy can have them as you will need to place 4-6 of them to get a desired result.

Auto-launchers are better for the initial shot but secondary and tertiary templates scatter D3" which means a ~2/3 of scattering uselessly, but the initial one tends to block the dreadnought/tank at least partially from the front.

Next all of these templates test per player turn so a good chunk will likely scatter/disappear before they even make a difference (1 in 3). And the auto-launchers only have two volleys in them so after that you are down to two blind grenades that scatter five times in six.

In short, if you were doing this strategy without the cheats it would be useful for stalling as long as the enemy was another gunline that expected to sit back and shoot (with the minimum 50% terrain recommendation this was a poor idea at best in most games I play). If they took transports or fast attack choices then they would do little as they simply flanked and hit you from a different angle. And minis inside blind clouds don't give up shooting, they moved half speed (usually 2") in a random direction, but as the only unit that would have gotten them on the enemy was your incorrectly made captain the chance of a unit getting a blind grenade on it from a gun that shoots smoke out 6" is slim. You may be remembering the auxilliary grenade launcher (terminator grenade launcher) for him, but that was frag and krak only and if you fired it and the gun then you incurred a -1 penalty to hit with both.

As it was it sounds like you were playing the game wrong and I feel sorry for the guy you introduced with the list for that as it is never fun to learn a game when the teacher is playing with so many obvious advantages. Had you remembered the rules better he may have been a convert, but alas another player turned off of 2nd.

Of course, as I said, you may just be misremembering and I hope you are since otherwise that is a pretty major cheat right there and it is no wonder you won against everything (though even with all that smoke an Eldar or Nid list would still tear you apart. Hell I could build a marine list that could trump that one pretty safely.). It always surprises me how much cheese people attribute to the game when they were playing it wrong.