Horus Heresy New Edition, or Just Horus Hearsay?

[Unknown Legionnaire]

I kinda like the vehilce rules, but that's about it.

 

The rest of those rules look exactly like what I was expecting from the first leaks (and also from what they did to their 'wording' in TOW), a garbled word-salad mess made for illiterates and people happy to discuss more than actually play the game. 

And still I am hoping I will be proven wrong.

 

On the upside, I tremendously enjoyed the 'early-80's-action-figure-style-saturday-morning-cartoon' trailer which they dropped. 

That was lovely. One bonus hug for that.

 

[Marshal Rohr]

Ah, yes, the primary target of convoluted writing: illiterates. It’s why Dostoyevsky is read in Kindergartens. 

[HeadlessCross]

On 6/26/2025 at 6:08 AM, BitsHammer said:

I think the intent is for both players to have the tools to play the mission. Folks will need to be mature adults and talk it out with their opponent about what type of game they both want. It's not like having a list built first prevents power gaming or skew builds 

Yeah list tailoring is totally awesome and somehow not as bad as just making an optimized list!

[SkimaskMohawk]

I prefer the editions of games where models block each other from moving, though I do enjoy that tank shock is also essentially baked into vehicle movement now too. 

[Taliesin]

Have they shown a table of contents of the new rulebook somewhere in these links?

Edited 4 hours ago by Taliesin

[Gorgoff]

https://imgur.com/a/dcKhPGI

 

The last bit the leaker shows is the line of sight rules and those for terrain and shooting and jerzuz do they suck.

True line of sight is gone.

A small Rhino completely blocks line of sight to the Saturnine Dreadnought behind it. 

A little piece of terrain  locks everything as well. Granted we can always declare that as light terrain in which case it doesn't block anything but that vehicles block line of sight no matter what is beyond stupid.

That we can kill models now outside line of sight is also beyond terrible. 

"Well well well,I can see one dude of your unit. I can kill now the whole squad."

[Marshal Rohr]

Pretty sure a rhino blocking line of sight to a Saturnine also blocks the Saturnines line of sight. YMMV but I’d rather that than endlessly arguing over TLOS with laser pointers. Maybe don’t think of it as line of sight, think of it as a clear fire lane. 

[Wibbling]

3 hours ago, Unknown Legionnaire said:

 a garbled word-salad mess made for illiterates and people happy to discuss more than actually play the game. 

 

 

 

Reading them it appears one needs to be highly literate! They're certainly complex and are written for 'rules lawyers' rather than perhaps more casual gamers. 

 

One of our club messaged me about them referencing that some international treaty docs were easier to read. Them's the breaks, I suppose. Writing rules is very difficult. We tried with our own group to simplify some of them and found many edge cases we couldn't account for. 

[Djangomatic82]

1 hour ago, Gorgoff said:

https://imgur.com/a/dcKhPGI

 

The last bit the leaker shows is the line of sight rules and those for terrain and shooting and jerzuz do they suck.

True line of sight is gone.

A small Rhino completely blocks line of sight to the Saturnine Dreadnought behind it. 

A little piece of terrain  locks everything as well. Granted we can always declare that as light terrain in which case it doesn't block anything but that vehicles block line of sight no matter what is beyond stupid.

That we can kill models now outside line of sight is also beyond terrible. 

"Well well well,I can see one dude of your unit. I can kill now the whole squad."

I liked most of the new rules at first, but as more are leaked, it looks like there is a bleed through of some of the worst 10th ed. rules and design philosophy from 40k into this new edition. The LoS and taking wounds from models out of LoS are a good example.

I think Liber Panoptica and a printer are going to be my hobby for the next 3 years.

[SkimaskMohawk]

Killing stuff that wasn't in LOS was one of the few negatives of 5th. It was mitigated by relatively low direct fire output, but it still wasnt great. 

[Marshal Rohr]

14 minutes ago, Djangomatic82 said:

I liked most of the new rules at first, but as more are leaked, it looks like there is a bleed through of some of the worst 10th ed. rules and design philosophy from 40k into this new edition. The LoS and taking wounds from models out of LoS are a good example.

I think Liber Panoptica and a printer are going to be my hobby for the next 3 years.

Fear not, you can only shoot with your models that have LOS to the unit. Unless you’re playing on an old school WFB table terrain will stop squads from shooting at full numbers

most of the time. 

[MARK0SIAN]

6 minutes ago, Marshal Rohr said:

Fear not, you can only shoot with your models that have LOS to the unit. Unless you’re playing on an old school WFB table terrain will stop squads from shooting at full numbers

most of the time. 

I think you’re overestimating the level of protection this may provide. Most of my games are on fairly terrain dense tables and even with that there are lots more occasions when my whole squad can only see one or two members of an opposing squad compared to times when not all of my squad can see the target. And even when the whole squad can’t see the target it’s usually only one or two models that have to miss out on shooting. 
 

I agree with Djangomatic82 that’s lots of the design philosophy of 40k seems to be creeping into this game. It’s kind of feels like they didn’t learn anything from some of the mistakes when 40k transitioned to 8th edition, especially with regards to line of sight.

[Marshal Rohr]

6 minutes ago, MARK0SIAN said:

I think you’re overestimating the level of protection this may provide. Most of my games are on fairly terrain dense tables and even with that there are lots more occasions when my whole squad can only see one or two members of an opposing squad compared to times when not all of my squad can see the target. And even when the whole squad can’t see the target it’s usually only one or two models that have to miss out on shooting. 
 

I agree with Djangomatic82 that’s lots of the design philosophy of 40k seems to be creeping into this game. It’s kind of feels like they didn’t learn anything from some of the mistakes when 40k transitioned to 8th edition, especially with regards to line of sight.

You’re tracking you can’t see farther than 3 inches into that isn’t barbed wire or rubble on a road right? Shooting through a ruined Ryza thing? No can do. Plasma pipes? Sorry Chief. New Volkus metal wall things? Don’t even dream of it. 

[Brofist]

Ignoring weapon and unit balance, so far the things I'm most tepid about from the core rules:

• Killing models out of LOS
• Just 3 cookie cutter missions
• 4 turn games
• No more simultaneous attacks in combat
• Extreme overwriting

Considering how pessimistic I was going into this, I was expecting more. I'm sure I'll melt down once the unit balance really hits (hellllo bad dreadnoughts and plasma)

[Dudley Nightshade]

In defence of ditching true line of sight, the game board and models are abstractions. The models' poses and positions are a snapshot, a static instant in time, whereas a battlefield is dynamic. Weapon ranges and even distances are abstractions too.

 

When a smallish thing blocks line of sight, I interpret that to mean the target is moving around so much that the shooter cannot get a quality shot. Maybe the shooter even takes a few shots to force the target into cover, but they both know those shots are not going to be effective beyond that.

 

Similarly, the shooter might be able to hit members of the target squad that the model cannot see because the one visible target model represents the squad member who pulled the short straw and has to poke his head around the wall to fire a covering shot or survey the scene. When he dies, the next guy has to step in and do that job. Someone needs to keep an eye on where the enemy is positioned.

 

I find having cover and shooting rules that go beyond aiming a laser pointer to be much more satisfying.

[Brofist]

I'll be ok with the new abstracted LOS rules if you can't kill what you can't normally see. Honestly a pretty easy house/event rule

[soviet1337]

I guess I have a three year extension on finishing my sons of horus now. Maybe plastic destoyers will come out by then!