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a_typical_hero wrote:
I'd like to add the introduction of knight-esque models to that list. They always felt out of place for me.

Knights, Wraithknights, that Tau one, Stompaz, ...

This. These things are just big, boring bricks of points that make the game less fun. Which is weird because Titans and other big stuff in Epic Space Marine (2nd ed) worked pretty well because of how they were broken up into chunks, so 900pts of Warlord Titan was as fun and interesting as 900pts of Land Raider Company; they did different things, but they were clearly playing the same game.

a_typical_hero wrote:
I'd like to add the introduction of knight-esque models to that list. They always felt out of place for me.

Knights, Wraithknights, that Tau one, Stompaz, ...

One big superheavy in a big (2,500-3,000pt) game never felt that out of place to me, it was when they started writing "oh, your army is all superheavies now" or "you can have a superheavy in a 1,000pt game" (which was, oddly enough, 6e!) that it started to feel weird. If you're playing a non-Questoris army in 30k where you have one LoW slot per detachment and the 25% rule (so you need to be in a 2,500pt game to take your 600pt Legion superheavy at all) they feel all right to me.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Nurglitch wrote:

a_typical_hero wrote:
I'd like to add the introduction of knight-esque models to that list. They always felt out of place for me.

Knights, Wraithknights, that Tau one, Stompaz, ...

This. These things are just big, boring bricks of points that make the game less fun. Which is weird because Titans and other big stuff in Epic Space Marine (2nd ed) worked pretty well because of how they were broken up into chunks, so 900pts of Warlord Titan was as fun and interesting as 900pts of Land Raider Company; they did different things, but they were clearly playing the same game.

The small superheavies didn't push the durability bar that much higher in practice (13/13/12 6HP Knight with a 4++ in one facing at a time; it was immune to non-Explodes damage results, but if you rolled well two lascannon hits could drop it. Compare to a 14/14/14 4HP Land Raider it's tougher, but not a lot tougher.); I think it's more of a problem in 8th/9th because you can't get around the ion shield by moving the way you could in 6th/7th. Also the changes to weapon stats mean that Knight guns in 8th/9th are efficient against a way broader range of targets than in 6th/7th; the basic RFBC used to be pretty poor anti-armour (you couldn't kill a Rhino from full health in one turn with it, though you could leave it immobilized with no gun and one HP left if you rolled well), and the AGC couldn't even damage another Knight (S6 into AV 13). The D-strength melee and Stomp could do a lot of work up close, but getting up close required you to make it much easier for someone to get around the ion shield.

 AnomanderRake wrote:
The small superheavies didn't push the durability bar that much higher in practice (13/13/12 6HP Knight with a 4++ in one facing at a time; it was immune to non-Explodes damage results, but if you rolled well two lascannon hits could drop it. Compare to a 14/14/14 4HP Land Raider it's tougher, but not a lot tougher.); I think it's more of a problem in 8th/9th because you can't get around the ion shield by moving the way you could in 6th/7th. Also the changes to weapon stats mean that Knight guns in 8th/9th are efficient against a way broader range of targets than in 6th/7th; the basic RFBC used to be pretty poor anti-armour (you couldn't kill a Rhino from full health in one turn with it, though you could leave it immobilized with no gun and one HP left if you rolled well), and the AGC couldn't even damage another Knight (S6 into AV 13). The D-strength melee and Stomp could do a lot of work up close, but getting up close required you to make it much easier for someone to get around the ion shield.

Yes, one feels they learned the wrong lesson when comparing Knights to Wraithknights in 6th/7th. It's like how they took pinning and going to ground out of the game, that it seemed like it felt bad to have to choose between doing nothing and getting wiped out, like how Knight players got to see their big boring brick compared poorly to the Wraithknight's big, boring brick.

What I think they should have done was implement pinning more broadly, lower Leadership down to a maximum of 9 for Chapter Masters and lower for everything else, strip out Fearless and And They Shall Know No Fear (or just allow players with these rules a bonus to the usual morale rules), and make stuff like Wraithknights and Knights (and vehicles) into collections of profiles like all the other units in the game.

Turning stuff into bricks is partly why we see the escalation that we do, because the only metric available for differentiating units is by how killy they are. Having psychology like morale and pinning and maybe stupidity and frenzy back in the mix would give players more interesting things to do then just maximize bonuses to kill stuff.

 Nurglitch wrote:

a_typical_hero wrote:
I'd like to add the introduction of knight-esque models to that list. They always felt out of place for me.

Knights, Wraithknights, that Tau one, Stompaz, ...

This. These things are just big, boring bricks of points that make the game less fun. Which is weird because Titans and other big stuff in Epic Space Marine (2nd ed) worked pretty well because of how they were broken up into chunks, so 900pts of Warlord Titan was as fun and interesting as 900pts of Land Raider Company; they did different things, but they were clearly playing the same game.

I have always felt that when you get to that size there should be the option of targetting different parts of such units, the ability to knock out one of the big weapons would make for a much more interesting tactical trade off I would say. You take it as far as Titans and really I think it becomes a bit silly when your can't target a weapon the size of a super heavy tank.

 AnomanderRake wrote:
The small superheavies didn't push the durability bar that much higher in practice (13/13/12 6HP Knight with a 4++ in one facing at a time; it was immune to non-Explodes damage results, but if you rolled well two lascannon hits could drop it. Compare to a 14/14/14 4HP Land Raider it's tougher, but not a lot tougher.); I think it's more of a problem in 8th/9th because you can't get around the ion shield by moving the way you could in 6th/7th. Also the changes to weapon stats mean that Knight guns in 8th/9th are efficient against a way broader range of targets than in 6th/7th; the basic RFBC used to be pretty poor anti-armour (you couldn't kill a Rhino from full health in one turn with it, though you could leave it immobilized with no gun and one HP left if you rolled well), and the AGC couldn't even damage another Knight (S6 into AV 13). The D-strength melee and Stomp could do a lot of work up close, but getting up close required you to make it much easier for someone to get around the ion shield.

You were still able to rotate in 7th, so, if you didn't have multiple assets to take advantage of that - fuggedaboutit.

 Daedalus81 wrote:

 AnomanderRake wrote:
The small superheavies didn't push the durability bar that much higher in practice (13/13/12 6HP Knight with a 4++ in one facing at a time; it was immune to non-Explodes damage results, but if you rolled well two lascannon hits could drop it. Compare to a 14/14/14 4HP Land Raider it's tougher, but not a lot tougher.); I think it's more of a problem in 8th/9th because you can't get around the ion shield by moving the way you could in 6th/7th. Also the changes to weapon stats mean that Knight guns in 8th/9th are efficient against a way broader range of targets than in 6th/7th; the basic RFBC used to be pretty poor anti-armour (you couldn't kill a Rhino from full health in one turn with it, though you could leave it immobilized with no gun and one HP left if you rolled well), and the AGC couldn't even damage another Knight (S6 into AV 13). The D-strength melee and Stomp could do a lot of work up close, but getting up close required you to make it much easier for someone to get around the ion shield.

You were still able to rotate in 7th, so, if you didn't have multiple assets to take advantage of that - fuggedaboutit.

Yeah. If all your AT weapons capable of doing meaningful damage to AV13 are in one place the Knight's going to beat you up. It encourages you to put AT units in multiple places on the board, or take fast AT capable of hopping arcs, rather than just building a firebase that sits in one place and tries to pound through the ion shield. (Remember this is pre-auras so you're not giving up that much by spreading out.)

That said this is undermined some by GW's refusal to define arcs as 90 degrees rather than by the corners of the mini, in practice if you took a shooty Knight its front arc was so wide it could cover most of the table and there were armies that had a very hard time dealing with it. I'm not saying Knights didn't present a problem in 7th if you weren't prepared for them, just that they felt fairer to me in 7th than they did in 8th/9th.

Here's what a Warlord Titan Hit Location Diagram looked like in 1992 or so, breaking a Warlord Titan up into targets.



Now, the problem was twofold in that after hitting the Warlord then you picked a square depending on the Titan's facing and rolled two dice, each with four blank sides, one with Up/Down replacing the 1 & 6, one with Right/Left replacing the 1 & 6. If the shot went off the diagram you missed. Which was annoying since it added a step to the disappointment of missing.

There was also no reason not to aim for the one-shot kill on the reactor.

But, without that one-shot kill, it worked well. The Gargants, for example, would catch fire and maybe explode if they had too many going at once.

 Nurglitch wrote:
Here's what a Warlord Titan Hit Location Diagram looked like in 1992 or so, breaking a Warlord Titan up into targets...

I've got a draft pseudo-Epic ruleset I've been working on occasionally over the years that lifts the basic idea of the Warmachine damage grids for big war engines, only your damage goes into the facing you're attacking from rather than always counting down from the top, so it's amusing to see that this was here first.

I still have trouble understanding why they didn't put any real locational damage mechanics onto the Knights etc. when they were introduced into the game. The fact that the Epic-scale hade more resolution to resolve anti-titan fire than 40K does to handle anti-Knight fire seems incredibly stupid.

 Nurglitch wrote:
Here's what a Warlord Titan Hit Location Diagram looked like in 1992 or so, breaking a Warlord Titan up into targets.

That's really interesting, thanks for sharing. Would have been fun if they incorporated a system like that for Knights into 40k instead of the one size fits all T7-8 and two fistfuls of Wounds they did for all vehicles.

 Nurglitch wrote:
There was also no reason not to aim for the one-shot kill on the reactor.

To be fair the head, legs, carapace, and indirectly the weapons were also all one-shot kills. The reactor was notable for doing what knights did in 6th - walk into the middle of your army and then explode killing half of it, which was a barrel of laughs with the wraightknights after they had finished d-strengthing any expensive vehicles you made the mistake of bringing to the game.

 Insectum7 wrote:
I still have trouble understanding why they didn't put any real locational damage mechanics onto the Knights etc. when they were introduced into the game. The fact that the Epic-scale hade more resolution to resolve anti-titan fire than 40K does to handle anti-Knight fire seems incredibly stupid.

Titans are a core mechanic in Epic. Titans are a side expansion they didn't expect anyone to play in 40k. Or were, before Knights, but by that point they were doing a lot of copy-pasting without paying that much attention to whether the army books they were writing would actually work.

A.T. wrote:

 Nurglitch wrote:
There was also no reason not to aim for the one-shot kill on the reactor.

To be fair the head, legs, carapace, and indirectly the weapons were also all one-shot kills. The reactor was notable for doing what knights did in 6th - walk into the middle of your army and then explode killing half of it, which was a barrel of laughs with the wraightknights after they had finished d-strengthing any expensive vehicles you made the mistake of bringing to the game.

Yeah, that's kinda my point about looking at the problem (the Wraithknight) and using that as a solution instead of dialing it back to the Knight level. 8th edition had the right away in putting everything on the same page with a standard profile, but the graduated profile (1/2 wounds, 1/4 wounds, dead) really just repeated the problem with the Wraithknight in 6th in that it made games worse, not better, because it was a boring brick with no answer but to kill it.

Mind you, D-weapons and instant death and a bunch of other things were the result of making the scale 1-10 for no reason that's ever been clearly explicated.

I remember fighting a titan before. One of the blokes who worked at the mines when I still lived in my home town had a one. Can't remember if it was a warhound or reaver, but I remember teaming up with a Tau friend to fight it.

I never thought they were overpowered. We beat it fairly easily. My tanks and heavy weapon teams basically stripped the shields, then my buddies railguns would try to hurt it. Then I dropped my suicide stormtroopers and did a ton of damage to it.

Back then it had some rule where you could actually get inside its void shield. Something like within 12 inch and you could avoid the shield entirely. It was pretty fun.

When did unique Nob Biker cheese start? I remember that being horrific and that bled into Grey Knight Terminator cheese, which didn't seem to peak as badly, but it all got wiped away at some point with wound allocations changing.

Isn't the real problem the community or more broadly, male competiveness in general? Men generally want to win and the community is male dominated. The issue of metagaming to an extreme taking precedence over fun or narrative seems to be a constant through the ages.

 trexmeyer wrote:
When did unique Nob Biker cheese start? I remember that being horrific and that bled into Grey Knight Terminator cheese, which didn't seem to peak as badly, but it all got wiped away at some point with wound allocations changing.

Isn't the real problem the community or more broadly, male competiveness in general? Men generally want to win and the community is male dominated. The issue of metagaming to an extreme taking precedence over fun or narrative seems to be a constant through the ages.

When in Rome...though honestly it isn't very fair to try and pin the flaws of a system on competitive players.

GK peaked pretty badly in my area. Ard Boyz like a decade or so ago was 22 people. 19 of them were GK.

 AnomanderRake wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
I still have trouble understanding why they didn't put any real locational damage mechanics onto the Knights etc. when they were introduced into the game. The fact that the Epic-scale hade more resolution to resolve anti-titan fire than 40K does to handle anti-Knight fire seems incredibly stupid.

Titans are a core mechanic in Epic. Titans are a side expansion they didn't expect anyone to play in 40k. Or were, before Knights, but by that point they were doing a lot of copy-pasting without paying that much attention to whether the army books they were writing would actually work.

Still, the higher resolution game (40K) winds up with the lower resolution mechanics. Not only is it silly, but it's a huge missed opportumity.

 Insectum7 wrote:
I still have trouble understanding why they didn't put any real locational damage mechanics onto the Knights etc. when they were introduced into the game. The fact that the Epic-scale hade more resolution to resolve anti-titan fire than 40K does to handle anti-Knight fire seems incredibly stupid.

That is second edition stuff, even sentinels had hit locations like leg. it makes the game a bit to complicated for an army battle game. If you want that level of detail play classic battletech. or second edition 40k


We recently did a 5th ed game using the old 3rd ed ruled for the warhound titan when it wass designed for normal games of 40K and it is far from the problem that people had with flyers and superheavies seen in 7th.

 aphyon wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
I still have trouble understanding why they didn't put any real locational damage mechanics onto the Knights etc. when they were introduced into the game. The fact that the Epic-scale hade more resolution to resolve anti-titan fire than 40K does to handle anti-Knight fire seems incredibly stupid.

That is second edition stuff, even sentinels had hit locations like leg. it makes the game a bit to complicated for an army battle game. If you want that level of detail play classic battletech. or second edition 40k


We recently did a 5th ed game using the old 3rd ed ruled for the warhound titan when it wass designed for normal games of 40K and it is far from the problem that people had with flyers and superheavies seen in 7th.

I don't recall superheavy rules for 3rd ed unless you're talking about the Mass Points system that was used in the Vehicle Design Rules.

I disagree about keeping that detail for Superheavies out of 40k though. For such big models there's not many ways to interact with them, and being able to do things like target the legs to slow them down, or target an arm to attempt to cripple a key weapon would have been welcome additions and wouldn't have been cumbersome. We're talking about a game where individual squad-member placement can be critical at times.

 Insectum7 wrote:

Spoiler:

 aphyon wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
I still have trouble understanding why they didn't put any real locational damage mechanics onto the Knights etc. when they were introduced into the game. The fact that the Epic-scale hade more resolution to resolve anti-titan fire than 40K does to handle anti-Knight fire seems incredibly stupid.

That is second edition stuff, even sentinels had hit locations like leg. it makes the game a bit to complicated for an army battle game. If you want that level of detail play classic battletech. or second edition 40k


We recently did a 5th ed game using the old 3rd ed ruled for the warhound titan when it wass designed for normal games of 40K and it is far from the problem that people had with flyers and superheavies seen in 7th.

I don't recall superheavy rules for 3rd ed unless you're talking about the Mass Points system that was used in the Vehicle Design Rules.

I disagree about keeping that detail for Superheavies out of 40k though. For such big models there's not many ways to interact with them, and being able to do things like target the legs to slow them down, or target an arm to attempt to cripple a key weapon would have been welcome additions and wouldn't have been cumbersome. We're talking about a game where individual squad-member placement can be critical at times.

I would welcome this, only for superheavies.

 Insectum7 wrote:

 aphyon wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:
I still have trouble understanding why they didn't put any real locational damage mechanics onto the Knights etc. when they were introduced into the game. The fact that the Epic-scale hade more resolution to resolve anti-titan fire than 40K does to handle anti-Knight fire seems incredibly stupid.

That is second edition stuff, even sentinels had hit locations like leg. it makes the game a bit to complicated for an army battle game. If you want that level of detail play classic battletech. or second edition 40k


We recently did a 5th ed game using the old 3rd ed ruled for the warhound titan when it wass designed for normal games of 40K and it is far from the problem that people had with flyers and superheavies seen in 7th.

I don't recall superheavy rules for 3rd ed unless you're talking about the Mass Points system that was used in the Vehicle Design Rules.

I disagree about keeping that detail for Superheavies out of 40k though. For such big models there's not many ways to interact with them, and being able to do things like target the legs to slow them down, or target an arm to attempt to cripple a key weapon would have been welcome additions and wouldn't have been cumbersome. We're talking about a game where individual squad-member placement can be critical at times.

FW actually has a seperate entire set of damage result rules for superheavy vehicles/flyers in 3rd that appeared in the original releases of imperial armor 1-3 for using them in normal games as apocalypse did not exist at the time.

It was a simpler system than 2nd but it did have a different damage table that is basically what you are looking for.

I will give you an example that actually happened to me in the last game.

penetrating hit result 2
engine damage
vehicle removes d3 inches of movement, if movement is reduced to 0 the vehicle is immobilized.

Now keep in mind almost all superheavies vehicles could only move 6", a titan could choose to move from 6- 12" but was reduced to firing a single weapon system if it moved that fast. .

So it is not directly targeting the legs but the effect is the same....until the onboard tech priest manages to repair the damage of course

Yeah locational damage for superheavies would be a much better way of doing things.

You could easily split them up into 6 locations; motive systems, weapon 1, weapon 2, weapon 3, commander, body; for example.
The datasheet should then define what hitting/damaging each of those did.
You could say randomly determine which location the attack hits, or choose the location for -1 to-hit or something.

They're super heavies, they deserve to be a little interesting.

In 2nd ed. Epic Space Marine/NetEpic I would say the hit allocation chart doesn't slow down the game massively. Yes you have to refer to the chart/damage, but the resulting variability of how damage occurs is more than worth it and can be tremendous fun. Titans can wander around with no arms trying to stand on stuff or get taken out by a single lucky head or reactor shot, Gargants stomp around gradually being consumed by flames as more and more shots hammer them, and finally the head pops off. Eldar Titans are as annoying as hell with their holo-fields making so many shots miss, and then you'll finally nail one with a Volcano Cannon shot and its the most satisfying thing ever! I definitely prefer it to the far more abstract version in Epic Armageddon, which treats Titans and superheavies as though they have an HP bar. And not having some sort of equivalent in 40k is hilarious if true, given the scale of the game.

I would probably agree with the OP as 6th was the edition that finally finished me off from the game. I basically just got tired of collections of miniatures that cost hundreds of pounds and had taken months to built and paint getting carpet-bombed by what looked like Tomix toys, and collections of unpainted, sometimes unbuilt, marine armies. I know lots of games have players that don't want to put the effort in, but 40k seemed to be most egregious in that regard, and it was too important an element for me.

I can totally see why Oldhammer is so popular. You have your rules collection, no new rules or codex release is going to suddenly torpedo them. People seem to put a massive effort in with the preparation of the army too, so the whole visual and theme thing is probably much stronger (certainly looking at some of the Oldhammer FB groups).

 Nurglitch wrote:
Here's what a Warlord Titan Hit Location Diagram looked like in 1992 or so, breaking a Warlord Titan up into targets.

Now, the problem was twofold in that after hitting the Warlord then you picked a square depending on the Titan's facing and rolled two dice, each with four blank sides, one with Up/Down replacing the 1 & 6, one with Right/Left replacing the 1 & 6. If the shot went off the diagram you missed. Which was annoying since it added a step to the disappointment of missing.

There was also no reason not to aim for the one-shot kill on the reactor.

But, without that one-shot kill, it worked well. The Gargants, for example, would catch fire and maybe explode if they had too many going at once.

The mechanics in that situation I'd agree meant that people rarely targeted the weapons, normally only with attacks that had no AV modifer or scatters. I wouldnt say that means a mechanic of being able to target the weapons is a bad thing though, I mean most obviously 40K isnt a game with nearly as much potential for one hit kills of big units so having Knight/Titan weapons targetable but with significantly lower wounds(and maybe lower toughness) than the rest of the model seems like it would be workable.

It would really shift things away from such armies either being shot of the board or shooting an opponent off of it in a turn or two, they would actually be more likely to survive as opponents would be more likely to expend damage going after weapons rather than the kill.

Really for models of that points cost I don't think more complex mechanics are a bad thing, an army of knights or even a Titan in a big non apoc game the player isnt needing to keep track of nearly as much as most armies so adding in a few more rules for them seems fine to me as it wouldnt bog the game down. Honestly with Titans they could add in a load of complexity and not really bog things down, things like having reactor power that can be allocated to certain systems boosting movement, weapons, bringing back void shields, etc would make them a lot more fun to play I'd imagine.

I rather like how vehicles worked in 5th edition (I think it was 5th...) where a hit could kill (unlikely) or shake/stun/immobilize/weapon destroy with a bonus towards the next hit. It seems to go better with the whole Toughness/Armour save concept where a successful roll to wound represented the hit doing enough damage to put a trooper down, and an Armour save representing hitting a location defended by armour. I think dropping the multiple wounds, hull points, and so on would have put heroes, monsters, and tanks on the level. Opening up the S/T scales with the old to-wound chart would have maintained the old AV benefit of some weapons being virtually useless against some targets just like 1+ saves in ESM (2nd).

Would speed things up without keeping track of wounds too.

Vehicles that weren't AV13 or 14 were actually useless since ANY result on the damage table was dreadful. Light and medium armored vehicles are much tougher and fun to play now.

AV13-14 vehicles were much more resilient to firepower but a single blow of a S 9-10 dude (with orks I had plenty of those) could wreck them with little effort.

Not to mention the limitations on firepower with firing arcs and movement.

In 5th I had to bring gimmicks to make my vehicles work: 3 battlewagons or 9 killa kanz to 1500 points games, all shielded by a KFF which gave them 4+. Unplayable units otherwise, but very competitive if spammed and under the KFF effect.

No, overall vehicles are in a much better spot now. Of course people can like older mechanics and considered them more fun to play, but if we're talking about usefulness of the vehicles now they finally do something.

The only vehicles that seem to be used a lot are those that are cheap, those that have inv saves or which have fly. Which for marines, the army that makes up the majority of all armies played, mans that the vehicles in 9th are not that good. LR die too fast, pods and rhinos can't transport a lot of the units being used, the impulsor cost so much, that you may as well buy another unit you want instead of the transport. The various primaris tanks have a bad cost to damage to resiliance efficiency. I don't think many people use the marine flyers too. So maybe the vehicle situation got better for some armies, but not the core audiance GW has.

I play 3 razorbacks every game with my SW. Now they're not crappy AV11, which meant that a single anti tank hit had very high chances to instant kill or cripple it. Not to mention firepower, 12 ass can shots instead of 4 in the old times? With no limitations for movement or line of sight.

 Blackie wrote:
Vehicles that weren't AV13 or 14 were actually useless since ANY result on the damage table was dreadful. Light and medium armored vehicles are much tougher and fun to play now.

Many of the top-tier lists in 5th were built around AV10-12 vehicles with little or no special protection. Even the least of the factions (radical daemonhunters) could run a potent parking lot.

The 5e damage chart was too reserved and the 4e chart too brutal for the higher costs ... ror transports at least, 5e vehicles spent a lot of time shaken and stunned.

Yeah no kidding.

My company of Chimeras certainly begs to differ. Did just fine with them.