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Hey, posted this in another thread, but thought it was a clever idea that was more balanced then flat out giving armor saves to vehicles. What it does, it lowers the amount of glance to death problems, and lowers the chance of 1 shot explode, which I think are the two extremes of vehicles defensive issues right now.

Here is what I propose.

*EDITED BASED ON COMMENTS BELOW 1/5/2016*
When you glance or pen, roll on haywire table with modifiers:

ap4/worse -1

ap3 0

ap2 +1

ap1 +2

glance -1

pen +1

25% cover -1

50% cover -2

This change would appear as follows:

ap3/worse -> glance: -2 mod (1-3 nothing, 4-6 glance). pen: -1 mod (1-2 nothing, 3-6 glance). Negating rolling on damage chart and giving a balanced save to vehicles against "small arms"

ap2 -> glance: -1 mod (1-2 nothing, 3-6 glance). pen: +1 mod (1-4 glance, 5-6 pen). This seems balanced, you cant roll on damage table if you glance, its more armor piercing so you will glance at the least but have a change to "pen" for vehicle damage.

ap1 ->glance: 0 mod (haywire as is). pen: +2 mod (1-3 glance, 4-6 pen). This might seem strong, but most ap1 is already designed for taking out tanks.. Otherwise, this gives a chance that even on a pen, your still only glancing, and limits rolling on the damage table further.

Scatter bike squad vs AV10: 12 shots -> 8 hits -> 2 glances, 2 pens -> translates to 2 glances. w/ Jink: translates to 1 glance


What you do you guys think of this?

Huh. It's quite a bit of rolling, but not much bookkeeping, and seems like it makes vehicles harder to kill but not unkillable.

If a vehicle has an invulnerable or cover save, when would you use that? After rolling to penetrate, or after rolling on the Haywire chart? (So you could muff a save, then still have the shot do nothing, or do you only roll to save after you confirm the hit was damaging)

Also, I might propose only applying the -1 modifier to AP4 and worse. There aren't many spammable AP3 weapons - Imperial Knight guns come to mind as one of the few - and krak missiles/starshot missiles are AP3, and they're meant for killing tanks. Autocannons can definitely hurt a tank, but they don't have as easy a time of it - AP4 is where I'd draw the line, since almost all the spamguns are AP4 or worse.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Oh, right - might also be worth running the numbers against the opposite extreme: say, dev cents (las/krak) versus a Monolith, or the like.

Another question: Lance, melta, armourbane. I'd think weapons with these special rules should always at least glance on a successful pen roll, regardless of their AP value.

My preferred idea is to get rid of glancing hits. You either beat the AR or you don't.

Attacks that specifically cause a glance under certain circumstances now will just remove a hull point.

Benefits, unless you have a something liek a Guass or Haywire weapon, there is no 'glance to death' option. LasCannons, Railguns and similar become the nly reliable way to engage heavy armour. Scatbike Spam, Missileside Spam and Autocannon Spam no longer are as powerful because they can't get it done against amour.

jade_angel wrote:
Huh. It's quite a bit of rolling, but not much bookkeeping, and seems like it makes vehicles harder to kill but not unkillable.

If a vehicle has an invulnerable or cover save, when would you use that? After rolling to penetrate, or after rolling on the Haywire chart? (So you could muff a save, then still have the shot do nothing, or do you only roll to save after you confirm the hit was damaging)

Also, I might propose only applying the -1 modifier to AP4 and worse. There aren't many spammable AP3 weapons - Imperial Knight guns come to mind as one of the few - and krak missiles/starshot missiles are AP3, and they're meant for killing tanks. Autocannons can definitely hurt a tank, but they don't have as easy a time of it - AP4 is where I'd draw the line, since almost all the spamguns are AP4 or worse.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Oh, right - might also be worth running the numbers against the opposite extreme: say, dev cents (las/krak) versus a Monolith, or the like.

Another question: Lance, melta, armourbane. I'd think weapons with these special rules should always at least glance on a successful pen roll, regardless of their AP value.

Good points, I was thinking some of that myself.

Whilst I agree with Jefffar that most weapons should not be able to glance something to death, I don't think we should stop high strength weapons from doing damage.

Lance weapons I think would work exactly as they do, they lower the AV which gives a higher chance to initially penetrate, and most are ap1-2, which would then get modifiers. As for Melta, armourbane, I think most of these are ap2?

If we adjust the modifiers, I think we solve the melta/armourbane issue..

ap4+ -> -1 glance: -2 mod (1-3 nothing, 4-6 glance). pen: -1 mod (1-2 nothing, 3-6 glance).
ap3 -> 0 glance: -1 mod (1-2 nothing, 3-6 glance). pen: +1 mod (1-4 glance, 5-6 pen).
ap2 -> +1 glance: 0 mod (haywire). pen: +2 mod (1-3 glance, 4-6 pen).
ap1 -> +2 glance: +1 mod (1-4 glance, 5-6 pen). pen: +3 mod (1-2 glance, 3-6 pen).

This may make it easier as well.. since ap2 and ap1 both have the same modifier now as the damage table.

In regards to what do we do with cover saves now? I think cover is insanely broken right now, so that may be a whole can of worms in and of itself. Otherwise, maybe cover is not taken normally on vehicles, but adds a -1 mod @25% and -2 mod @50%

Essentially making the results as follows in 25%:

ap4+ -> glance: -3 mod (1-4 nothing, 5-6 glance). pen: -1 mod (1-2 nothing, 3-6 glance).
ap3 -> glance: -2 mod (1-3 nothing, 4-6 glance). pen: 0 mod (haywire).
ap2 -> glance: -1 mod (1-2 nothing, 3-6 glance). pen: +1 mod (1-2 glance, 3-6 pen).
ap1 -> glance: 0 mod (haywire). pen: +2 mod (1-3 glance, 4-6 pen).

and again in 50%:

ap4+ -> glance: -4 mod (1-5 nothing, 6 glance). pen: -2 mod (1-3 nothing, 4-6 glance).
ap3 -> glance: -3 mod (1-4 nothing, 5-6 glance). pen: -1 mod (1-2 nothing, 3-6 glance).
ap2 -> glance: -2 mod (1-3 nothing, 4-6 glance). pen: 0 mod (haywire).
ap1 -> glance: -1 mod (1-2 nothing, 5-6 glance). pen: +1 mod (1-4 glance, 5-6 pen).

I realize this makes cover very strong against ap4+ weapons but it is less so against weapons meant to punch armor, and I think that keeps it more balanced towards needing anti-tank specific weapons.

Since we probably won't see cover change... we could take both invul and cover saves as normal after initial dice results, then roll on the modified haywire table. You mentioned this being many dice rolls.. but think about it, right now if you pen even with a small arms weapon we are rolling extra on the damage table. In this case.. a good chunk of the time you will not be doing this, as a glance result will not roll on the damage table. I think this allows vehicles to stay more useful as well, reducing the amount of random damage they take.

The problem with treating cover saves as modifiers instead is that Jink grants a cover save, as do things like Night Shields or Night Fighting (Stealth).

My question about when a save is taken, though, had nothing to do with cover being too strong. As it currently stands, if you successfully save against a damaging (glance or pen) hit, you take no damage. Fail the save, you at least lose a hull point. If the hit is a pen, you don't roll on the damage chart until you see whether the hit got through the save or not.

Under your proposed system, though, we could get something like the following:

A Predator fires an autocannon at a Fire Prism. The SM player rolls a 6, for a penetrating hit. The Fire Prism has a holo-field, so it gets a 5+ invulnerable save, but the Eldar player rolls a 3, and fails. So now the SM player rolls with modifiers on the Haywire chart - and rolls a 2, for no damage inflicted, even though the Eldar player failed the save.

That seems very odd to me.

As for Lance, Melta, Armourbane - every Melta weapon I can think of is AP1, granted, and most Lance weapons are AP1/2, but there are a fair number of Armourbane weapons that aren't. The Farseer's Singing Spear or Witchblade (in melee) comes to mind, as does the Transuranic Arquebus and the Tyranid Toxicrene's blast attack.

IMHO, all three special rules should probably eliminate the Haywire chart roll altogether, and just do damage directly. The few Armourbane attacks that aren't AP1-2 aren't things you're going to spam, anyway. There aren't too many things that can spam Meltas, though Dominions, Crisis Suits and Fire Dragons come to mind - but all of those are intended to be dedicated anti-tank (or anti-MC) units. I don't hear a lot of crying about losing Predators to Crisis Suits - I hear crying about losing them to scatterbikes and Necron Warrior blobs.

As for Lance spam, mostly only DE can do that, and they don't have a lot of other options for anti-tank - making their dark lances less reliable mostly serves to nerf something that very few people think needs nerfing.

jade_angel wrote:
The problem with treating cover saves as modifiers instead is that Jink grants a cover save, as do things like Night Shields or Night Fighting (Stealth).

I think this is still ok with modifiers, jink essentially grants a 50% cover save as it stands, so would be -2 mod on the chart.. I can see however how a DE player would be bitter that he has terrible saves against ap1 weapons even with jink, rerollable cover could maybe be a reroll on the table..

If cover is taken as a modifier, I am not sure how to incorporate invulnerable saves unless we also convert those to modifiers as well:

6++ -> -1 mod

5++ -> -2 mod

4++ -> -3 mod

3++ -> -4 mod

Does this make things worse or better?

jade_angel wrote:

As for Lance, Melta, Armourbane - every Melta weapon I can think of is AP1, granted, and most Lance weapons are AP1/2, but there are a fair number of Armourbane weapons that aren't. The Farseer's Singing Spear or Witchblade (in melee) comes to mind, as does the Transuranic Arquebus and the Tyranid Toxicrene's blast attack.

IMHO, all three special rules should probably eliminate the Haywire chart roll altogether, and just do damage directly. The few Armourbane attacks that aren't AP1-2 aren't things you're going to spam, anyway. There aren't too many things that can spam Meltas, though Dominions, Crisis Suits and Fire Dragons come to mind - but all of those are intended to be dedicated anti-tank (or anti-MC) units. I don't hear a lot of crying about losing Predators to Crisis Suits - I hear crying about losing them to scatterbikes and Necron Warrior blobs.

Good point, I forgot about singing spears and the like. Hmm additionally we have an issue with D-weapons. With all of these, if we say ignore the haywire table, then that solves that, and saves are taken as normal (invul/cover)


Automatically Appended Next Post:
I do have to say at this point, we have a ton of modifiers and crazy maths that you can easily messup to your disadvantage. I think a haywire type table might be the way to go still but I will rethink this in regards to cover and invul saves.

Jefffar wrote:
My preferred idea is to get rid of glancing hits. You either beat the AR or you don't.

Attacks that specifically cause a glance under certain circumstances now will just remove a hull point.

Benefits, unless you have a something liek a Guass or Haywire weapon, there is no 'glance to death' option. LasCannons, Railguns and similar become the nly reliable way to engage heavy armour. Scatbike Spam, Missileside Spam and Autocannon Spam no longer are as powerful because they can't get it done against amour.

I'll point out that penetrating hits still remove hull points, so most spamguns would still get the job done, just a bit less reliably than they do now. I'm not sure if that would be enough: autocannons (and their equivalents) could still punch AV12, and how often are those kinds of things being used to kill AV13 anyway? It would stop scatterbikes from killing Knights, though.

What you'd get rid of:

Bolters killing Raiders, Venoms, Land Speeders
Pulse Rifles killing Rhinos, Razorbacks, Night Scythes, etc
Scatter Lasers killing Imperial Knights, Chimeras, Falcons, Devilfish, etc
Autocannons killing Predators, anything with Quantum Shielding until the shields go down, Skyrays, etc
Krak missiles killing Land Raiders (does this happen with enough frequency to worry about?)

Importantly, you'd also get rid of various sorts of Hail-Mary close-combat antitank measures.

jade_angel wrote:

Jefffar wrote:
My preferred idea is to get rid of glancing hits. You either beat the AR or you don't.

Attacks that specifically cause a glance under certain circumstances now will just remove a hull point.

Benefits, unless you have a something liek a Guass or Haywire weapon, there is no 'glance to death' option. LasCannons, Railguns and similar become the nly reliable way to engage heavy armour. Scatbike Spam, Missileside Spam and Autocannon Spam no longer are as powerful because they can't get it done against amour.

I'll point out that penetrating hits still remove hull points, so most spamguns would still get the job done, just a bit less reliably than they do now. I'm not sure if that would be enough: autocannons (and their equivalents) could still punch AV12, and how often are those kinds of things being used to kill AV13 anyway? It would stop scatterbikes from killing Knights, though.

What you'd get rid of:

Bolters killing Raiders, Venoms, Land Speeders
Pulse Rifles killing Rhinos, Razorbacks, Night Scythes, etc
Scatter Lasers killing Imperial Knights, Chimeras, Falcons, Devilfish, etc
Autocannons killing Predators, anything with Quantum Shielding until the shields go down, Skyrays, etc
Krak missiles killing Land Raiders (does this happen with enough frequency to worry about?)

Importantly, you'd also get rid of various sorts of Hail-Mary close-combat antitank measures.

granted it was with haywire grenades, but my squad of 10 firewarriors charged and killed a DeathCo Dread in close combat... That is one of those things that is hilarious but probably shouldn't happen. Although mind you a marine squads with a powerfist or meltabomb could equally do it.

Well, that still works, but that's haywire grenades - those really are dangerous. In the hands of Fire Warriors, they're definitely a Hail-Mary measure. Actually ,the power fist is part of what I had in mind. Against AV14, that's fishing for a 6 to glance. Get rid of glances (as Jefffar suggested) and that power fist suddenly can't hope to dent a Monolith (without, say, Hammerhand making it S10). Melta bombs can, though - as they should.

Though I'll betcha, play those two lists against each other 10 more times and that won't happen again. EMP-warriors are mostly useful to wake up an opponent who gets careless, to perform board control, and to have some last-ditch antitank in case your Crisis Suits and Riptides go down and there's still an Objective Secured Land Raider parked on the objective you really need...

Here is the link to the original poster

I like the concept but I also don't think we should flat out prevent a glance from doing damage, I just think it needs to be preventable.

Following the poster's concept however.

Glance Table:

1-4 no damage occurs

5-6 lose hp

7+ lose hp -> penetrating hit instead (roll on damage table)

AP2 and AP1 will have the same modifiers.

The shooting phase would be as follows:

Target vehicle -> roll to glance/pen as normal
IF GLANCE -> roll on glance table
IF PEN -> lose hp and roll on vehicle damage table as normal

Much simplified compared to what I initially was doing but does essentially the same thing. Allows "armor piercing" rounds to still have an opportunity to cause vehicle damage, it also adds drastic survability for even av10 with cover/invul saves + a chance to do no damage.

@jade_angel what do you think?

Ok, now that I like, for the most part. Also, yeah, even though say, S6 spam can still chew up a Venom pretty quick, 33% of the damaging hits have a 66% chance to do nothing at all even before saves.

That'll help Orks and DE quite a bit.

The only tweak I'd make is to make the chart like this:

1-2 no effect
3-6 lose hp
7+ penetrating hit

Then modify per AP as follows:

AP1 - +2 (100% to at least strip HP, 33% chance to lucky-punch)
AP2 - +1 (83% to at least strip HP, 16% chance to lucky-punch)
AP3 - +0 (66% to at least strip HP)
AP4 - -1 (50% to at least strip HP)
AP5 - -2 (33% to at least strip HP)
AP6 - -3 (16% to at least strip HP)
AP- - -4 (0% to at least strip HP)

Now a glancing hit from a meltagun will hurt (I'm thinking of the Land Raider Achilles or Spartan Assault Tank here, with Armored Ceramite), while the Serpent Shield will do precisely nada to AV12. (And nothing to AV10/11 unless it pens)

Oh, right - Gauss, Harlequin's Caress, etc should either just remove a hull point or inflict a hit with Haywire if their "auto-glance" condition is triggered, rather than actually glancing. Otherwise, Gauss Flayers become far too long-odds, same with Caresses. You'd be fishing for 6+, followed by 5+, and then they get a save. Now, I know Gauss is mean, but by the same token, Necrons don't actually have all that much dedicated anti-tank, so they rely on it more than many armies would.

yeah I would say any "auto-glance" trigger acts as normal.. haywire would still act as normal. Modifying the AP table would be near 0 effort.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

jade_angel wrote:
Ok, now that I like, for the most part. Also, yeah, even though say, S6 spam can still chew up a Venom pretty quick, 33% of the damaging hits have a 66% chance to do nothing at all even before saves.

That'll help Orks and DE quite a bit.

The only tweak I'd make is to make the chart like this:

1-2 no effect
3-6 lose hp
7+ penetrating hit

Then modify per AP as follows:

AP1 - +2 (100% to at least strip HP, 33% chance to lucky-punch)
AP2 - +1 (83% to at least strip HP, 16% chance to lucky-punch)
AP3 - +0 (66% to at least strip HP)
AP4 - -1 (50% to at least strip HP)
AP5 - -2 (33% to at least strip HP)
AP6 - -3 (16% to at least strip HP)
AP- - -4 (0% to at least strip HP)

Now a glancing hit from a meltagun will hurt (I'm thinking of the Land Raider Achilles or Spartan Assault Tank here, with Armored Ceramite), while the Serpent Shield will do precisely nada to AV12. (And nothing to AV10/11 unless it pens)

Oh, right - Gauss, Harlequin's Caress, etc should either just remove a hull point or inflict a hit with Haywire if their "auto-glance" condition is triggered, rather than actually glancing. Otherwise, Gauss Flayers become far too long-odds, same with Caresses. You'd be fishing for 6+, followed by 5+, and then they get a save. Now, I know Gauss is mean, but by the same token, Necrons don't actually have all that much dedicated anti-tank, so they rely on it more than many armies would.

I actually don't think the extra AP mods are really needed. Some armies are stuck with high str but no ap weapons so that would really hurt them I think.