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let me begin by saying that i have dedicated my life to perfecting the concept of Tank-Walls. it has been my greatest passion. the latest 40k rules have opened the gate to a strategy that i think will revolutionize the game as we know it. imagine being able to march groups of infantry through open ground with impunity and with complete fields of fire. imagine them always having a 4+ cover save. imagine withering firepower that obliterates the enemy defenses and at the same time provides cover for your advancing infantry, skimmers and other elements.

how is this possible? easy. it all has to to with the current los rules, cover save rules, the WYSIWYG rules, and the conversion rules.

here is my concept:

take a tank, any tank, and convert it into a mobile fortress with walls extending from the sides, behind the weaponry, so it will maximize its fields of fire. the length of the extension should be no longer than 12 inches on both sides, or maneuverability will be virtually impossible. however if you wanted to create a static fortification with teeth, a tank-wall with extended walls, both vertically and horrizontally would be formidible. and at a relatvely low point cost, considering what you get.

in order for your advanciing infantry and vehicles to be able to shoot, slits must be designed into the tank-wall. make sure they are large or numerous enough to give your forces (infantry, tanks, hw squads, etc) excellent fields of fire, while still providing them the 4+ cover save.

the strategy is to have multiple tank walls, advancing and protecting massed infantry and blocking los to your indirect artillery so it can pound the enemy with impunity. if the walls are high enough, the movement of skimmers can be interdicted. weapon systems can also be spread across the walls, converted if you will to maximize fields of fire.

the best part is that when the tank-walls are destroyed, they become difficult terrain that still provides your infantry an excellent fighting position and cover save.

all tank-walls should have dozer blades or any other upgrades that reroll failed terrain tests.

imagine a black templar landraider crusader tank-wall with blessed hull rolling down the battlefield filled with assault terminators in its belly. imagine what you can hide behind it. and i shudder to think about a necron monolith tank-wall.

this is the future.

this is tank-walls.

DISCLAIMER: this is part satirical and part serious.

Excellent idea.

Which is the serious part? Hopefully, the only serious part was where you said that the idea was partly satirical.

I'd like to expound your idea into an even better idea. Here's mine.

It's called "The box trap technique."

When we play a game, I put a cardboard box down over your deployed forces. It is 36" tall, and has two holes in the rear. The front of it has holes poked into it at the 12-24" mark above the ground, and ramps leading up to that 12-24" mark. Inside the box, it is dark and scary. Every non-vehicle unit must take a leadership test at the beginning of each phase; if they fail, they fall back (the holes in the back of the box exiting the board are for you to reach in and remove models). During each shooting phase, every unit must roll a D6, with the following results:

1: They get startled by sounds behind them in the dark and fire every weapon into the nearest unit with the following attack profile: Rapid Fire
2-5: They can't see in the dark and shoot at nothing
6: They may fire as normal.

Since the holes in the box are at the 12-24" mark above ground level, I hope that your troops are 2 feet tall!


Meanwhile, the opponent army moves up to the box, up the ramps to the holes cut in the box, pokes their guns through, and fires into the box, down onto the enemy army with the following rules:

Nightfight: Its dark in there! Nightfight Rules are in effect.
Confined Space: Ricocheting rounds are dangerous; all missed hits may be rerolled.
Wat wuz dat?: Any unsaved wounds on a unit cause every unit in the box to panic at the sound of the death screams and gunfire and take a pinning check.
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------

What do you think of my modified rules?

~Yawn~

This concept has been done before. Good luck getting that to fly with your opponents.

Actually modifying your GW miniature into something completely broken to gain an unfair advantage? I presumed he was joking. C'mon, my post had to be at least a little funny. I was laughing and in tears when I wrote it....maybe my humor is failing. :(

This goes in the humor thread.

Tank walls are sris bznz.

Seriously though, without abusive modeling this is totally possible, what do you think Land Raiders are so tall for?

If you really want to make a custom rolling-barricade tank, go for it, it would work great for Orks especially, but only expect to use it as a funny set-piece in an Apoc Battle with custom rules and with a consenting opponent. I can even see some very fitting Battlewagon possibilities in this; eg interlocking sheild wall on Deff Rollas and all that.

Wooops! Sorry, Dashofpepper, I was completely referring to gothmog, not you. I knew you were joking!

Anti-cover barrage weaponary gives this idea two fingers.

Very tall mounted valkyries (and vendettas) give this idea another three fingers.

Deep-striking stuff again shows this idea the door.


It is too inflexibile and is too full of conceptual holes to be useful half the time.

I'm totally going to spring the box-trap technique on my opponents during 'Ard Boyz semi-finals.

Dashofpepper wrote:I'm totally going to spring the box-trap technique on my opponents during 'Ard Boyz semi-finals.

Is there some exact rule I'm missing in the rulebook or in tournaments that says conversions aren't allowed? I've faced plenty of models that weren't even close to the same as the GW models.

I get the point that you guys think any kind of converting that could give you an advantage in any situation is "NOT COOL", but your example is silly and contributes nothing to the discussion.

When they say Win at All Costs, I don't think they counted the price of your dignity. =)

skipdog172 wrote:Is there some exact rule I'm missing in the rulebook or in tournaments that says conversions aren't allowed? I've faced plenty of models that weren't even close to the same as the GW models.

I sympathise, we've all faced some weird/stupid conversions across the table, and those of us who love to convert always worry about opponents thinking our converted models are weird/stupid.

I don't think there are any rules as such. But the general principle seems to be that the more 'serious' the game (especially in tournaments), the more important it is that conversions are close to the standard model dimensions and weapon layout. But in a friendly game against your mates, it doesn't matter so much - "Ok everyone, that coke can is a Land Raiser, ok?" Even something like Gothmog's suggestion can be absolutely fine for an amusing social game, but could get you bitch-slapped/disqualified in a tournament.

Personally I don't play 40K to spend time arguing with people, so I make the effort and ensure my conversions are close to the standard model dimensions and weapon layout (even if it's just a folded paper box proxying as something while I try a new army list). I'd rather have people admiring my conversions, not wanting to break them across my head...

Somefing like dis? (3:12 for the lazy.)

skipdog172 wrote:

Dashofpepper wrote:I'm totally going to spring the box-trap technique on my opponents during 'Ard Boyz semi-finals.

Is there some exact rule I'm missing in the rulebook or in tournaments that says conversions aren't allowed? I've faced plenty of models that weren't even close to the same as the GW models.

I get the point that you guys think any kind of converting that could give you an advantage in any situation is "NOT COOL", but your example is silly and contributes nothing to the discussion.

Judges can and often do strike down absurd stuff like that.. Yet another reason to use a unified FAQ like adepticon which clarifies this

But what about interlocking Deffrolla Battlewagons? Obviously not going to cover the entire board, but maybe a good foot?

i agree that the concept is absurd. but that does not render it ineffective. i think i will create a few prototypes combining landraider crusaders and imperial districts. traveling ruins. i love convertig models. dmn it feels good to be a gangster.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Razerous wrote:Anti-cover barrage weaponary gives this idea two fingers.

Very tall mounted valkyries (and vendettas) give this idea another three fingers.

Deep-striking stuff again shows this idea the door.


It is too inflexibile and is too full of conceptual holes to be useful half the time.

you said it all with very tall mounted valkyries. why not tanks with very tall walls mounted to them?

You could always make modified Vindicator Seige Wall Dozer Blade, with the cannon sticking out the front! It would be all camoflaged, too!

"Didn't we see that same hab-block six streets back? Did that one have an enormous barrel in the window too?"

Legal is 1 thing.

Flagrant exploitation of the 3 said conditions, seems a good way for a player to be wanting to play people MORE than once, up a creek of effluvia, in a coracle, with only a whisk.

Great rules, for somebody who wanted to be cheezy.

But, play it anywhere but your very own "playboy mansion" with "Bunny staff", you won't ever play me twice with said exploitation.

If you said you had such a Mansion, I might be persuaded......

cool idea. but how do the walls move?

I think the idea is that you have mobile walls extending from the back of your tanks so that your foot troops can snipe out from behind them while advancing and staying in cover. If a wall is a 4+ cover save, then you're basically getting to take 4+ cover anywhere you want with you on the field instead of having to move to cover.

Thus....my counter-proposal of "the box trap." Its equally fun to play.

yes, the idea is that you convert tanks in such a way that they provide cover for the advancing infantry. the "walls" are actually part of the tank, but they provide 4+ cover as per the cover rules. it's radical, i agree, but is legal. since i generally play daemons, it will not be a major strategy i use (darn i just contemplated the soulgrinder tank-wall). any-hoo, as a tactic, albeit cheesy, i say it would be effective.

gothmog wrote:it's radical, i agree, but is legal.

Could you flesh this part out for me a bit more? I haven't pored over every detail in the rulebook, so there could certainly be stuff I don't know about. I thought that the only time you could build your own tanks was in an apocalypse game, and then they had to conform to certain building rules.

Yes you may model on walls onto your vehicles but if we're both setting up the field 2 or 3 buildings are going to be lumped across the board with a gap smaller then your tank between them. In A tournament expect to be asked to leave

Actually, nowhere in the rules does it say that you are allowed to modify your models. Allowing conversions is a compact between gamers, and is not covered by the rules. If I were a TO, and your opponent said "hey, I don't want to play against that," I would disqualify the offending models.

Presuming the rules are permissive, and you need the rules' permission to do something, there certainly isn't anything in there about extraordinary modeling or the rules pertaining to it. If you're allowed to build portable walls on a tank, then there's no reason to not take it to the next level and build a massive wall across the front of one of your tanks that extends across the entire battlefield.

You could operate it on hydraulics and claim that it moves with jump infantry rules. During your movement phase you raise it, and your whole army fires out, and during your assault phase you lower it and deny LOS for the whole enemy army.

Yeah...I think the tank wall thing extends behind the rules.

According to the rules you can't "Model for advantage" which is exactly what this is. Otherwise I'd cut my land raider down to the tracks with the guns mounted on top and get a 4+ cover save from anything not within 12 inches.

So, these 'walls' converted onto your tanks, would count as part of the vehicle.

So, when you get hit with the 'Destroyed-Explodes' and measure a D6" off the vehicle....thats gonna cover alot of ground.

And of course there's the fact that no-one would actually play you.

SM players have been doing this for years sans the conversions. It's called a rhino.

pneumatichorseman wrote:According to the rules you can't "Model for advantage" which is exactly what this is. Otherwise I'd cut my land raider down to the tracks with the guns mounted on top and get a 4+ cover save from anything not within 12 inches.

what page in the rulebook is that on? conversions are fundamental to the game, as expliained in the WYSIWYG rule stating that all wargear and options and whatnot must be represented on the model. this rule does three things for the game. it keeps players honest in tournament settings so they can't claim crazy wargear options that are obviously not even remotely represented on the model). it keeps creativity in the hobby, and it allows players to gain access to units that there are no models to represent or the models are oop (like the seekers of slaanesh). i agree that conversions should honestly represent the model, and not be tailored to give unfair advantage, but who is to say what is unfair, and what is conversion? i faced a fellow daemon player not too long ago who made all his soulgrinders standing on their tippie-toes just to gain the height los advantage. his strategy didn't work, and i slaughtered his army, but i could not help thinking how foolish he was for taking a great model and making it look stupid just to gain a rules advantage. not my cup of tea. was that conversion? i cannot imagine that i could have gotten him disqualified just because i didn't like the way his models had been assembled. on the other had, i faced a dark eldar opponent once that had lady-bic razors representing raiders, and all of his darklances represented disintegrators. i woud only play him in friendly games, and even that turned into a chore. i mean c'mon. lady-big shaving razors as raiders?

i think this post is comically misunderstood. while it is true that that if i had money to burn, i would contemplate building the absurd tank-wall models, and even use them in a friendly game.

in a tournament, well that's another situation all together. as much as i love winning, i do have a sense of sportsmanship, and would never pull the tank-wall gambit, or any of the other "conversion" garbage i've seen or read about. there is an etiquette that sould be observed.