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The only way this could work is if you also lowered the armor values of every vehicle in the game, as to balance out armies where you can simply blow MCs off of the field turn on with a few lascannons...

"See that Carnifex?"

"Yes..."

"Well, I fired 5 lascannons, 2 hit, and now you have 4 wounds on it!"

"Ok, he's gone."

Rinse and repeat, every Nid army will be completely unplayable beyond any feasable belief, as our shining stars, Tervigons would be dead T1 to any form of shooting that is S8+, I.E. Anything heavy in a Imperial Guard army. This would also screw Tyranid Warriors over EVEN MORE, as a Krak Missile headed its way would inflict D3 instant death wounds on it. Ouch, little chance, even with cover to survive that.

EDIT: Ok, this may be a little bit of an overeaction, but the point still stands, this will only make strong weapons that much stronger against things they do not need to be more powerful against. It will also weaken armies which incorporate MCs: Tyranids and Daemons.

Since there seems to be a lot of worry about MCs, I'll change it to be as follows.

Against Monstrous Creatures, instead of d3 wounds, roll a d6. On a 4+ the MC takes 2 wounds, on a 2 or 3, it only takes 1 wound, and on a 1, it takes no wounds at all!*

Limits the ability to just instantly obliterate MCs, while still making it so that stronger weapons hurt much more than lower strength weapons, while also helping to balance out MCs in a more positive direction .


*This 'roll a 1 on your determine wounds roll = no wounds!' is just an idea I had at the last minute. It can be removed very easily, as I'm not too sure about it.

I think you'd also need to re-balance weapon selections.

With the amount of high power/low ap weapons armies can take in 5th, this could get out of hand fast.

Limiting the heaviest weapons to 0-1 or 0-2 either to squad or dare I say the entire Army, would make this not seem as such overkill.

An example is a Devastor squad pumping 4-5 Lascannon shots, easily making a model/squad (MC or not) taking anywhere from 5-18 wounds in a single shooting phase (with your current change).

Yes, I understand that you're wanting to make the big guns "BIG", but they would need to be restricted or you'd have major balance issues.

Consider a Space Wolves ability to fire at 2 targets within a shooting phase, could easily demolish entire squads with this just using the Missile Launcher. Due to the current wound allocation rules, that's 3-6 wounds, per weapon, across the entire squad of 1 wound models, not 1 guy, so you could feasibly take out entire MEQ squads in a single shooting round.

I'm not trying to stifle creativity here, just demonstrating how this, although an interesting idea, would take considerable rule changes and army changes to be more effective.

Well the big balancing thing there is that it will ONLY apply to individual models, the wounds would not overflow onto the rest of the unit. It'd just make one model very very dead.

Here's an example:

A heavy bolter opens fire on an IG squad in cover, it scores 2 hits, and then scores 2 wounds.
I then allocate those wounds onto 2 models.
I then roll a d3 for each of those models to determine how many wounds they'd take from the original wound since the HB is wounding them on a 2+. Let's say one gets 3 and another gets 1.
Since I now get to take cover saves, the model that took 3 wounds from its original wound would have to make 3 cover saves to live, while the other would only have to take 1.


The wounds do not overflow. A 3 shot weapon will still only kill at maximum, 3 models. It just makes bigger weappons better at. killing things.
....And makes wounding a bit more complicated, but I'm willing to live with that for purpouses of realism.

ChrisWWII wrote:....And makes wounding a bit more complicated, but I'm willing to live with that for purposes of realism.

Heh, so I've notived.

By the way, love the avatar.

What IS Chris' avatar?

Fexor wrote:

Heh, so I've notived.

By the way, love the avatar.

Indeed!

Caramelldansen Marine thanks you for the compliment.

I don't think this is necessary. Both from a game balance and believability point of view.

First, for game balance, both Nids and daemons don't really need a nerf ..large or small nerf ...leave the poor guys alone.

Second, using some mathhammer on your example...a battlecannon is 15x more likely to cause an unsaved wound on a carnifex then a lasgun (assuming average blast scatter) ....and at 3x the range. Effectively this makes the battlecannon 15x more powerful . Even if you decide to rapid fire the lasgun, the battlecannon is still 7.5x more likely to cause an unsaved wound and at 6x the range....those guardsmen now become questionably close to the carnifex...while the battlecannon can continue teeing off on the carnifex from distance. (someone check my mathhammer)

The fact the lasgun can wound every so often represents a lucky shot that gets through a weak part of the armor and damages a vital organ. The battlecannon on the other hand is much more likely to blow out a new a**hole for the carnifex regardless of where it hits.

1) on average only MC and independent characters have more then one wound so if you are lucky one heavy would kill most of a ten man squad
2) in the new codex a type of assassin has a special rule that does something like what you are talking about

ironhandstraken wrote:1) on average only MC and independent characters have more then one wound so if you are lucky one heavy would kill most of a ten man squad

I'm honestly starting to get tired of repeating this. WOUNDS WILL NOT OVERFLOW. When you roll 'number of wounds' and score more wounds than it takes to kill a model, the wounds will vanish into the aether. If you shoot a lascannon at a squad of Guard, you will make one Guardsman very, VERY dead, but only one Guardsman. The rest of the squad will be fine, except for wondering why there's a cloud of red mist where their buddy used to be.

Tongue wrote:
The fact the lasgun can wound every so often represents a lucky shot that gets through a weak part of the armor and damages a vital organ. The battlecannon on the other hand is much more likely to blow out a new a**hole for the carnifex regardless of where it hits.

While it's true that the volley of lasgun fire could represent a single lucky shot, I still think that a battlecannon shell shredding a fair chunx of the 'fexes body should be more painful than a lucky las-shot. Tell me, what would you consider more painful/damaging...a pin that somehow got through your defenses, or a grenade? Even though the pin will hurt like hell, the grenade is going to be more lethal.

Finally, people are focusing far too much on the MC angle. When I introduced the idea, I wasn't thinking about MC, I was thinking about Marines. Since you have to take multiple saves now to save even one wound, Marines suddenly find themselves a lot more vulnerable to things like autocannons and other high strength, high AP weapons. It basically serves to make their armor a little less impregnable for thigs that don't have the magic AP3.

ChrisWWII wrote:
While it's true that the volley of lasgun fire could represent a single lucky shot, I still think that a battlecannon shell shredding a fair chunx of the 'fexes body should be more painful than a lucky las-shot. Tell me, what would you consider more painful/damaging...a pin that somehow got through your defenses, or a grenade? Even though the pin will hurt like hell, the grenade is going to be more lethal.

Finally, people are focusing far too much on the MC angle. When I introduced the idea, I wasn't thinking about MC, I was thinking about Marines. Since you have to take multiple saves now to save even one wound, Marines suddenly find themselves a lot more vulnerable to things like autocannons and other high strength, high AP weapons. It basically serves to make their armor a little less impregnable for thigs that don't have the magic AP3.

"The best example I can come up with is a 'Nid MC taking wounds."

That was the second sentence in your OP. I'm going off what you wrote.
Plus, people are focusing on MCs since this seems to negatively effect mostly MC heavy armies that rely on high wound units...such as nids and daemons. Two armies that seriously do not need nerfs .

You are going at this from a believability angle (not gameplay or balance) which is fine...but again I think the current system is believable enough. That single Battlecannon is going to kill a carnifex a heck of a lot faster than a single lasgun. You don't need to make it even stronger to represent this. You can either view the lasgun wound as a lucky shot, or as a constant chipping away of armor that finally leaves a vital spot exposed. Imo from believability angle, its fine as is.

From a gameplay angle there is another problem with this idea. There is already so much dice rolling in this game. This adds an additional dice roll to determine how many more dice to roll ..then you would normally . It unnecessarily slows down the game (something GW is trying to get away from).

In its current iteration I'm not feeling this idea from a believability, gameplay or balance point of view. However I do think there is a good idea here. Just need to polish the idea bit. Im not exactly thrilled with how the ID and EW mechanics are currently playing out, so maybe something like can replace it.

I like it-if i land a demolisher shell on a carnifex its going to do more damage than a lasgun.
same if i fire a heavybolter at a guard officer-if i was hit by what is essentialy a grenade combined with an antitank missile combined with a heavy machinegun i think ide lose a bit more
than 1 wound-i mean come on read the fluff-their wouldnt be anything left exept some bloody tatters and maybe a smoking pair of boots.