The following is taken from the Warhammer Community page.
Movement has always been key to Warhammer 40,000 – positioning your units for optimum arcs of fire, advancing to claim objectives or just plain-old charging across the battlefield into combat!
Movement in the new edition will be very familiar to players of the game today, but the rules team have taken the opportunity to improve a few elements.
In the new edition, every model has its own Movement characteristic. This means that, rather than every model moving 6″ unless specified otherwise – things like Terminators will advance slowly and inexorably, while Harlequins leap and bound, and bikes and speeders zip across the battlefield.
Some units will have a minimum move too – this mostly applies to flyers, who can’t stop. Again, this is much like the rules today, but every flyer will have their own minimum and maximum move value, to represent the fact that swift fighters will naturally be quicker than a lumbering bomber.
Running has been rolled into the Movement phase now, too. You can “Advance” when you move by rolling a dice and adding the result to your Movement to go a bit faster at the expense of shooting.
This applies to all models – infantry, vehicles, bikes – everyone. By including this roll as part of your move, the game speeds up, as you no longer have to move models in both the Movement and Shooting phases.
Other than that, the movement rules are pretty much what you’d expect today – no moving though enemy models, unless you can fly over them, and no walking through solid walls – logical stuff.
Oh, there was one last thing.
If you’re in combat at the start of your turn, you can Fall Back by moving away from the enemy. You’ll lose the ability to advance, shoot or charge that turn, and crucially, enemies will be able to shoot at you! This does, however, open up a vast range of tactical options for armies like the Astra Militarum, who will now be able to effectively deploy in firing lines, with each row falling back from any assaults in good order (if they survived) while the unit behind them fires at the attackers. It goes both ways though – if you have a dedicated assault unit that specializes in killing infantry (like Warp Talons) your opponent will find it much harder to pin them down in combat with heavily armoured units for the entire game.
That’s a big change!
We’ll let that rattle around your brain for a day, and we’ll be back tomorrow with news about the Psychic phase.
Smart. Hit and Run lite for everyone and runs folded into movement.
The already revealed variance in movement is huge! Allows for quite a bit of variability.
Continues to look good both in terms of streamlining and balance.
I’m betting things that have Hit and Run right now will take reduced penalties from Fall Back or potentially none at all. Raven Wing Black Knights being able to jump from one combat to another seems thematic and stylistic for them.
I’m glad running got rolled in with movement. I hope the dice roll scales with your base move somehow and isn’t just an extra D6 (so faster units get a better “advance” than slower ones) but I’m sure they’ve got that figured out.
Wow! These are such GOOD changes!!!
Not sure if I like the “roll a die to Run”. A Move 3 model could run 9l with a lucky roll while a Move 5 could go only 6″. Would have rather kept it at double the models Move value, but I’ll wait and see how it plays out with the rest of the rules
They also didn’t say exactly how the mechanic is going to work yet. It could be as simple as rolling a D6 and adding that to your base movement or it could be more complicated and base the additional distance on your basic move speed.
I hope it’s the latter but we’ll have to see.
I came to the same realization. We didn’t really get a true rule definition there, just the concept.
Does falling back proc an AO? (Where my Dnd peeps at?)
Ye gods! Attacks of opportunity!
The quagmire of rules that was AoO in 3rd Edition was staggering. Though not as bad as grappling.
Nothing is ever as bad as grappling. I don’t care what system it is. The grappling rules are always the worst.
That’s how it works in AoS and slow units still feel slow, sure they have a potential to move an extra 6 but that’s far from guaranteed, and that extra move is at the expense of contributing in any other way.
I’m guessing like AoS certain units will get 2d6 run or d6+3. Dwarfs in AoS only move 4 but can choose to guarantee a 4 run instead of rolling, makes them feel slow but methodical, would suite Necrons well.
Still good stuff coming out. It all makes sense.
It’s really hard to not think about the implications of “Fall Back”. Surely some units will ignore aspects of it. Just have to wait and see.
Psychic tomorrow. Big day.
I could see some units with special rules allowing them to Fall Back then run but not shoot or charge. While others could Fall Back then shoot only. And still others could Fall Back then charge only.
Did they mention anything about jetpack moves? I could probably live with just high movement, but I’d be sad to see the classic jump-shoot-jump disappear.
I’m guessing it’ll be like AoS, no overall rule but units will have their own specific rules that allow them to do stuff like that like Glade Riders.
I imagine that if every unit has a pseudo-hit and run to escape combat, that overwatch will be a thing of the past. It would be unfair to get a further shooting phase when your opponent charges you if you know you will have no penalty shooting them the following turn.
I hope so. If I had my choice of “here’s how we can make shooting-only armies more resilient against combat” I’d choose this over Overwatch any day of the week… never liked that mechanic.
I’m pretty sure it’s going to end up making things more interactive, too, with more back and forth rather than one side either getting shot away before they make it into combat or the other getting wiped if they fail to shoot the assaulters away.
That roll to run…hope its something like: unit cannot run more then its base movement. That would keep the theme of a slow unit slower then a faster unit even if it rolled way better on its run.
More importantly, psychic phase tomorrow!
I hope the Psychic Phase post just says:
“The last version of the Psychic Phase was a mistake. We’re sorry. We’ve brought it out back and shot it. It’s buried in a shallow grave right next to Invisibility.”
I hope it’s more along the lines of:
“AOS Spells are great. We’re doing that. Here’s a few generic spells everyone has, and here’s unique spells each faction/race has.”
Remember that time when you just had to randomly roll for powers and based on that roll you could be a god or you could be useless for the entire game? Yeah we thought that was dumb, too, so we’re fixing it!
-Things I hope GW says
Yo dawg I heard you like randomness. So I put some randomness in your randomness so you can random 2d6 times per turn!
All I want is to be able to pick certain things. There should be an element of randomness, but not on stuff you need to plan around.
Don’t forget that’s random 4d6 times per turn if you play chaos!
Exactly.
At the end of the day, your squad of twin-linked Devastators could all miss. Or you could roll a bunch of 1s to pen. It happens.
But when you’re trying to strategize and make a list it shouldn’t be dependent on “gosh I hope I get the psychic power that actually makes things click.”
As an example my last game was Tzeentch daemons and I rolled on the daemonology tree 15 times. Didn’t get a single cursed-earth roll. A 3+ invul over a 4+ in a giant bubble (not to mention summons without scatter) would have been a huge boon. That was part of my plan going into the battle because it enabled what I wanted to do so well. But no luck…
Part of the problem has to do with the fact that there are some powers that are just demonstrably better than everything else in the tree *cough cough* invisibility. But even if the powers are relatively balanced you’re always going to have scenarios when you really want one for your specific list but have no guarantee you’re going to get it.
The current system is honestly almost like what would happen if you could only take ‘special weapons’ on all your tactical marines and then before the game you rolled a D6 for each squad and that determined whether they had a flamer, plasma, melta, grav, etc.
It’s like when I bring the Avatar of Khaine and people are like, “He’s really not that great.” But if I roll for Invisibility, then they quickly change their minds because an invisible Avatar of Khaine is amazing. But the times when I don’t roll it, he’s dead by the second turn, at the latest.
Rolling for Random Powers? Nah, I always gave my Herald of Tzeentch Prescience, Summoning, and Flickerfire and called it a day. The real issue was always that some disciplines were “all risk, little reward” (poor Pyromancy. While Sunburst was nice vs lightly armored MSU, everything else was naff) or the opposite (“eh, I’ll roll for Invisibility and if I don’t get it, default to Shriek.”)
I wrote a system awhile back that was a fleshed out 7th system:
-Nonrandom powers.
Psykers know 2 powers per ML at army creation.
-Psykers have 2 Warp Charge per ML, but can only use their own ML.
-Powers are based on degrees of success. Deny simply removes successes (and lessens power effects, even if it fails to completely deny).
-Every discipline has 4 basic powers and 2 advanced. For each advanced, you must learn 2 basic from the same discipline.
I really would rather them not do an AOS magic system.
This is the best idea ever and they need to use if word by word.
So it seems like everybody has Hit and Run now .
Insomuch as your whole army is not forced to sit there and stare at the deadly mass of enemies six inches away from them, completely dumbfounded and unable to act in any way because OH MY GOD THERE’S STILL ONE OF OUR FRIENDS LOCKED IN COMBAT THERE, I GUESS WE’LL JUST SIT ON OUR THUMBS.
In the grim darkness of the far future there is…a surprising amount of humanity towards your embattled comrades.
So it seems like everyone has Hit and Run now .
No shooting after advancing but there is nothing about charging?
I like where this is going. Straight for the enemy line that is.
It says right there that you cannot charge either.
The new “Fall back” mechanic says you can’t charge. The “Advance” thing just says “at the expense of shooting.” Says nothing about charging.
I quite like this revolutionary concept of keeping movement in the movement phase. Most of the things I’ve seen yet were discussed as really being needed in the store I used to hang out in then 3rd launched but hey 20 years later ain’t so bad right?
At least it’s still a roll so the phase can be slowed down a little bit and has some randomness (random=FUN!)
I’m pretty sure you and your friends weren’t talking about how Running needed to be done during the movement phase back in 3rd edition, because Running didn’t exist until 5th edition.
What is now running was an Eldar and Dark Eldar racial ability in third and was happening in the shooting phase exactly like it did for everyone else later.
To be fair that little bit wasn’t high on the radar then though. Things like safe’s being all or nothing and the vanished modifiers or inability to shoot into close combat were way bigger deals.