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Simplest fix is just give them a 1+ armor save. Still fails on a one but only penetrable by AP1 and they still have the invul. For their current points quite balanced.

 casvalremdeikun wrote:

I'd not mind facing assault cannon termintaors with my SAG meganobz. For no point cost ofc.

 casvalremdeikun wrote:
I am absolutely serious. Take a similarly equipped and costed unit and compare. A five man unit of sanguinary guard with four power fists, angelus Bolters, and one sword encarmine comes in at 205 points, 5 points more than the basic 200 point Terminator squad.

The Terminator squad has 5 24" Str4 AP5, Assault 2 Storm Bolters, the Sanguinary Guard has 5 12" Str4 AP4, Assault 2 Angelus Bolters. So while the Terminators have more range, Sanguinary Guard have more penetration. The Power Fists are a draw since same Str. The Sword Encarmine vs the Power Sword goes to the SE since master crafted. The Sanguinary Guard also have more choices for weapons.

Their stats are basically the same except the Terminators have a 5++. So advantage Terminators. But the Sanguinary Guard have jump packs so they are much more mobile.

So for the low low price of -5 points, a little range and a 5++, the Terminators give up some AP on their Bolters, a Master crafted Power Sword, and a ton of mobility.

I don't think giving them more penetrating power and rending would be too much of a trade for reduced mobility and no MC on the sergeant.

(Emphasis mine)

Um, no they don't. The Terminators have 5 Assault Cannons - for a total of 20 S6 AP4 Rending shots.

 buddha wrote:
Simplest fix is just give them a 1+ armor save. Still fails on a one but only penetrable by AP1 and they still have the invul. For their current points quite balanced.

I could have sworn I read that the Emperor had an armor save of 1+. Armor saves of 1+ do not fail from rolling 1 ever and can only be hurt by ap1 weapons. So even if you caused a wound, he would auto save unless it was AP1 and he had to roll an invul save or a cover save.

 vipoid wrote:

 casvalremdeikun wrote:
I am absolutely serious. Take a similarly equipped and costed unit and compare. A five man unit of sanguinary guard with four power fists, angelus Bolters, and one sword encarmine comes in at 205 points, 5 points more than the basic 200 point Terminator squad.

The Terminator squad has 5 24" Str4 AP5, Assault 2 Storm Bolters, the Sanguinary Guard has 5 12" Str4 AP4, Assault 2 Angelus Bolters. So while the Terminators have more range, Sanguinary Guard have more penetration. The Power Fists are a draw since same Str. The Sword Encarmine vs the Power Sword goes to the SE since master crafted. The Sanguinary Guard also have more choices for weapons.

Their stats are basically the same except the Terminators have a 5++. So advantage Terminators. But the Sanguinary Guard have jump packs so they are much more mobile.

So for the low low price of -5 points, a little range and a 5++, the Terminators give up some AP on their Bolters, a Master crafted Power Sword, and a ton of mobility.

I don't think giving them more penetrating power and rending would be too much of a trade for reduced mobility and no MC on the sergeant.

(Emphasis mine)

Um, no they don't. The Terminators have 5 Assault Cannons - for a total of 20 S6 AP4 Rending shots.

I was illustrating how things are now as to why giving Terminators a hefty boost is warranted. The increase from 10 Str 4 AP5 shots to 20 Str 6 AP4 Rending shots is in exchange for their poor mobility, and worse choice of weapons. Maybe raise their points to 42 pts per model, but not any higher than that.

 Filch wrote:

 buddha wrote:
Simplest fix is just give them a 1+ armor save. Still fails on a one but only penetrable by AP1 and they still have the invul. For their current points quite balanced.

I could have sworn I read that the Emperor had an armor save of 1+. Armor saves of 1+ do not fail from rolling 1 ever and can only be hurt by ap1 weapons. So even if you caused a wound, he would auto save unless it was AP1 and he had to roll an invul save or a cover save.

That would be a homebrew rule, as there is no armour save of 1+ in 40K.
A natural roll of 1 is always a fail on Armour Saves (and a small number of other things).

 casvalremdeikun wrote:
I was illustrating how things are now as to why giving Terminators a hefty boost is warranted. The increase from 10 Str 4 AP5 shots to 20 Str 6 AP4 Rending shots is in exchange for their poor mobility, and worse choice of weapons. Maybe raise their points to 42 pts per model, but not any higher than that.

A reasonable boost is warranted, but giving them all assault cannons is still deserving of a 5pt increase.

In addition to doubling your shots, S6 AP4 Rending is miles better than S4 AP5 - there are just so many more targets you can threaten. As it stands, you're basically limited to softening up infantry a little before you get to them. With this change, you can mow down infantry, kill MCs, obliterate light vehicles, threaten fliers, etc. And, even with supposed poor mobility, they still have a 30" threat range. That's the same as a Pask Punisher - which has 20 S5 Rending shots with no AP, and is considered incredibly good. Sorry, but you're really undervaluing having an entire unit of Assault Cannons.

As it stands, they're a melee unit with a bit of shooting. This would turn them into an incredibly strong ranged unit, but with no reduction in melee power either.

I suppose having them cost as much as THSS Terminators wouldn't be the end of the world. 45 pts isn't unreasonable.

I'm against the AP1 only rule, as terminators are exactly the desired target of plasma weapons, and that would only give too much of an advantage to meltas (who already are dominant in the current meta).

I'd either make them all waaay cheaper, or make their stormbolters much killier: give them Sternguard ammo, for example!

I don't think that Casvalremdeikun is completly out of his mind with his Assault Cannon idea. At 40 points a model, maybe a bit crazy, but at 45 points a model, and maybe a reduction to melee ability, I think it should be workable and satisfy my Gatling fetish .

The point is, the way I play, I may want Terminators as the durable anchor of my shooty army, and the way that they're currently configured, that isn't a possibility. Assault cannons are perfect for this, I think, as they provide a good balance of anti-infantry and light vehicle destruction.

The Eldar would still smoke these terminators, so why the hell not?

When I came into 40k in the mid 90s i recall terminators being pretty scary. If we brought them back where they should be, I think +3 toughness would fix it because:

That would make S3 weapon spam put back into its place and reinforce the reason why terminator armour is even labelled as 'tactical dreadnought armour'
Still give plasma a decent chance to kill.
Lascannons can still take them down with ease.

The storm bolter could do with an extra shot as discussed earlier, but I think giving assault cannons as standard would be the wrong solution, -termies' main problem is their underwhelming durability, not firepower.

Rewriting the armour piercing and save mechanic would do termies justice without making them broken. Save modifiers worked quite well in 2nd, instead of the "all or nothing" AP system. Here's something I came up on a D10 based system I'm trying to write:

Super Heavy armour (terminator, mega mrmour) 2+ save
Reinforced Heavy (artificer) 3+
Heavy (power, heavy aspect) 4+
Medium (carapace, tau, ork 'eavy armour, aspect, tough chitin) 6+
Light (flak, mesh, medium chitin) 8+
Basic (ork vests, light chitin) 9+

Save Modifiers:
bolter -1
heavy bolter -2
autocannon -3
plasma -4
krak missile -4
melta -6
lascannon -6

 thegreatchimp wrote:

Super Heavy armour (terminator, mega mrmour) 2+ save
Reinforced Heavy (artificer) 3+
Heavy (power, heavy aspect) 4+
Medium (carapace, tau, ork 'eavy armour, aspect, tough chitin) 6+
Light (flak, mesh, medium chitin) 8+
Basic (ork vests, light chitin) 9+

Save Modifiers:
bolter -1
heavy bolter -2
autocannon -3
plasma -4
krak missile -4
melta -6
lascannon -6

d6 will be the current ap system and d6 dice, d10 will be the proposed one.
Chance to die from a wound caused by:

A shoota
d6 - 16% d10 - 10%

A bolter
d6 - 16% d10 - 20%

Heavy bolter
d6 - 16% d10 - 30%

Autocannon
d6 - 16% d10 - 40%

Plasma
d6 - 67% (invul) d10 - 50%

Krak missile
d6 - 16% d10 - 50%

Melta, Lascannon
d6 - 66% d10 - 70%


The introduced system will reduce the durability of 2+ save against all but plasmaguns and no-ap weapons.

 thegreatchimp wrote:
The storm bolter could do with an extra shot as discussed earlier, but I think giving assault cannons as standard would be the wrong solution, -termies' main problem is their underwhelming durability, not firepower.

Rewriting the armour piercing and save mechanic would do termies justice without making them broken. Save modifiers worked quite well in 2nd, instead of the "all or nothing" AP system. Here's something I came up on a D10 based system I'm trying to write:

Super Heavy armour (terminator, mega mrmour) 2+ save
Reinforced Heavy (artificer) 3+
Heavy (power, heavy aspect) 4+
Medium (carapace, tau, ork 'eavy armour, aspect, tough chitin) 6+
Light (flak, mesh, medium chitin) 8+
Basic (ork vests, light chitin) 9+

Save Modifiers:
bolter -1
heavy bolter -2
autocannon -3
plasma -4
krak missile -4
melta -6
lascannon -6

I did something similar for Aegis (linked to in my sig if anyone's curious), I rescaled stats so it takes a jump of two points to change the value needed to wound by one, then Terminators got T6 as opposed to T5 for regular Space Marines and a 1+ armour save (auto-pass unless someone's got at least -1 worth of AP, so it's immune to lasguns and most unupgraded melee but it's 2+ against most small arms and progressively worse against heavier guns), plus a 5+ Ward save (Inv taken in addition to armour more like Fantasy) and cover as a to-hit modifier so there's some point in heavily armoured folks making use of it. They've been appropriately terrifying in the few test games they've shown up in.

The IG player says thanks for making the lasgun even more irelevant.

Yeah, I don't understand this fascination people seem to have about making infantry immune to lasguns.

What else are we supposed to shoot them at?

 vipoid wrote:
Yeah, I don't understand this fascination people seem to have about making infantry immune to lasguns.

What else are we supposed to shoot them at?

Who said anything about making infantry immune to lasguns? The point here is about making Terminators immune to lasguns. (I put the option to run Guardsmen with hellguns (which do have armour penetration and can affect Terminators) on non-conscript squads into my Guard rules to compensate; the point is that you shouldn't be able to kill the heaviest armour in the game by poking it enough, not that poking it enough isn't the solution to some things)

 AnomanderRake wrote:
Who said anything about making infantry immune to lasguns? The point here is about making Terminators immune to lasguns.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but terminators are de facto infantry.

 vipoid wrote:

 AnomanderRake wrote:
Who said anything about making infantry immune to lasguns? The point here is about making Terminators immune to lasguns.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but terminators are de facto infantry.

Big heavy infantry typically not deployed in large numbers, but yes. I made the heaviest possible infantry armour class in the most heavily-armoured Codex immune to a third of the Guard's possible small arms options in this ruleset.

 AnomanderRake wrote:

Big heavy infantry typically not deployed in large numbers, but yes. I made the heaviest possible infantry armour class in the most heavily-armoured Codex immune to a third of the Guard's possible small arms options in this ruleset.

But why is this necessary or balanced?

At the very least, why are you just making them immune to lasguns - and not bolters, Pulse Rifles and similar weapons?

 vipoid wrote:

 AnomanderRake wrote:

Big heavy infantry typically not deployed in large numbers, but yes. I made the heaviest possible infantry armour class in the most heavily-armoured Codex immune to a third of the Guard's possible small arms options in this ruleset.

But why is this necessary or balanced?

At the very least, why are you just making them immune to lasguns - and not bolters, Pulse Rifles and similar weapons?

If you click on the Project Blog link in my signature and scroll down a bit there are some design goals listed there; I don't want to get into a long speech but this particular mathematical situation is a result of trying to make the range of model stats wider and to make different small arms matter instead of requiring escalation to more and better special/heavy weapons to get anything done.

To answer your second question Terminators are more resilient to bolters and pulse rifles than they would be in 40k (though not immune), and Codexes don't have one single small arm that everyone uses all the time. It's possible in Aegis to field a viable Guard army with zero lasguns (using hellguns, hot-shot lasguns, and shotguns instead). 'Light' small arms (autoguns, lasguns, Eldar lasblasters, fleshborers) are supposed to be skirmisher weapons; they tend to have better range and more shots than 'heavy' small arms (bolters, hellguns, shuriken catapults, pulse rifles) but they don't hit as hard.

Before you ask I'm trying to design the core rules to reward TAC lists instead of GW"s current skew-lists-win approach; an army of all Terminators is certainly possible, but it'd be slow, toothless outside close range, and easily whittled down by heavier armaments (consider that with the save modifier system a Terminator only has a 3+ save against most factions' machine gun equivalents (heavy bolters, shuriken cannons, burst cannons, and the like)).

The problem is not that Terminator armor is bad, it is that AP is to good, across the board.

There are far to many weapons that ignore armor of far to many units. More of the "basic" infantry weapons need to have the AP worsened by at least 1. High AP weapons need to cost more.

The game, in general, needs to have the points costs balanced better than the "it felt right" method of pointing models.

 megatrons2nd wrote:
The problem is not that Terminator armor is bad, it is that AP is to good, across the board.

There are far to many weapons that ignore armor of far to many units. More of the "basic" infantry weapons need to have the AP worsened by at least 1. High AP weapons need to cost more.

The game, in general, needs to have the points costs balanced better than the "it felt right" method of pointing models.

The issue is the all-or-nothing AP system. 2+ armour either ignores five in six shots or it takes them all, which makes it nigh-impossible to accurately price since depending on the situation it's either godly or irrelevant, this makes AP2 as a result nigh-impossible to accurately price.

I think GW's other decisions also play a factor.

In 7th:

- Vehicles have become incredibly durable, and nothing with AP3 or worse can explode them.

- MCs have been getting tougher and tougher since 6th - and we now have cheap Dreadknights, Wraithknights and Riptides floating around.

- IKs exist and can form armies with no infantry whatsoever.

- Super Heavies are allowed in normal games.


Basically, GW has virtually demanded that every army max out on anti-tank weapons. And, unfortunately, these also tend to be very good against terminators (which didn't even receive a price-drop).

If you want fewer AP2 weapons in the game, perhaps we should also look at some of the stuff that necessitates the inclusion of AP1/2 weapons.

 AnomanderRake wrote:

 megatrons2nd wrote:
The problem is not that Terminator armor is bad, it is that AP is to good, across the board.

There are far to many weapons that ignore armor of far to many units. More of the "basic" infantry weapons need to have the AP worsened by at least 1. High AP weapons need to cost more.

The game, in general, needs to have the points costs balanced better than the "it felt right" method of pointing models.

The issue is the all-or-nothing AP system. 2+ armour either ignores five in six shots or it takes them all, which makes it nigh-impossible to accurately price since depending on the situation it's either godly or irrelevant, this makes AP2 as a result nigh-impossible to accurately price.

Not necessarily so. I know that Sv 6+ costs 1 point in the minds of GW. I also know that upgrading Sv 5+ to save 4+ costs 15 (unless it changed in the most recent codex) points in the mind of GW. Thus the cost of an AP 4 weapon that has no further changes to it's stats should also cost 15 points more than it's predecessor. The issue is that they can't figure out that a 14 point marine is better than a 20+ point guardsman in carapace armor. You can balance an item if there is a system in place to balance them, if you are using a sliding scale and gut feeling that changes at every edition and between armies than it is impossible to balance. No system is perfect, but if there is no system then it is impossible.

The all or nothing AP system should be the easiest to balance because it is very predictable. A ruff idea for costing it using my own numbers:

AP/Save/cost
-/-/-
6/6/1
5/5/5
4/4/10
3/3/15
2/2/20

Of course these are not perfect, but the armor efficiency does get better, maybe use an exponential growth instead, but it is possible to balance it.

Stick 5 TH/SS in a redeemer and something that gives them FNP (master Harath Shen works amazing)

 koooaei wrote:

The introduced system will reduce the durability of 2+ save against all but plasmaguns and no-ap weapons.

Hmm, yeah, I hadn't crunched the numbers on it, I see what you mean. I'd have to reduce some of those save modifiers by a point.

 megatrons2nd wrote:
The problem is not that Terminator armor is bad, it is that AP is to good, across the board.

There are far to many weapons that ignore armor of far to many units. More of the "basic" infantry weapons need to have the AP worsened by at least 1. High AP weapons need to cost more.

The game, in general, needs to have the points costs balanced better than the "it felt right" method of pointing models.

I have issues with the AP system too and miss 2nd edition at times. Having a modifier system allowed for some very interesting distinctions between infantry types.

As for what you propose, imo, just making AP weapons worse won't really fix the issue. If anything, fixing the more exotic armours, like terminator armour, would be easiest by extending the ap scale downward (less re-engineering). Terminator armour could perhaps go into the realm of 1+ save (remember a 1 always fails) and that way it helps lighten the AP issue it has.

Im more in favor granting a toughness bonus to armour rather than exclusively relying on AP. I see terminators as T7 dudes who should be able to rain on the parade of greater demons.

T5 makes sense, T7 is ridiculous. Way too tough.