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 Wyldhunt wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
The game is going to require a big redesign to make vehicles good again, or even just feel right. But going back to armor would be a step in the right direction. Yes, it would require bases on vehicles and/or a template.

Honestly, the games design has gone downhill since 5th. A few good additions were made, but they keep messing up the good parts.

Note that returning to Armor Values (rather than just Toughness values with rules for flanking) is its own distinct topic with its own distinct problems.

I'm guessing everyone is pretty tired of hearing me ramble about why AV lowering interactivity between units and promoting skew lists is bad, right?

Everything should have counters, and indeed hard counters should sometimes exist. AV of certain levels counters the spam of low power high volume attacks. You should NEVER be able to damage a Titan with a lasgun under any circumstances, in the fluff or on the tabletop.

Alternately, if we don't go back to AV, we could at least make certain Toughness values be unwoundable by certain strength values.

Perhaps change how wounding works. Make it so to wound you roll the D6 and add the Strength to together. if you equal or exceed the targets toughness you wound it, if you are under you fail to wound. So if the toughness is 7 or more than the attacks strength you cant hurt it at all, and attacks with an equal or greater strength than toughness would auto wound. This would also be far easier to remember/teach new players. No need for the crossreference charts that GW has always had.

This would require a total shuffle of toughness values upwards to maintain the same dynamics. Most toughness values would probably need to double while most weapons would remain the same. T8 marines, T6 guardsmen. Vehicles and monsters could be high teens or even 20+ toughness. Anti-tank weapons could even go back to the old days of rolling multiple D6 to wound. Multi-melta with Strength 8+2D6 type stuff.

Skew lists aren't necessarily bad for game balance. And they tend to cause other players to build to counter them if they become meta. The only reason they really were so much of an issue is because tournament play for 40k has always been 1 list per player so everybody gets locked in at the start. If tournaments allowed you to have 2 or more potential lists it wouldn't be as big of an issue as you could counter potential skews.

Which is why most other wargames that are played competitively use the multi-list format, it just cuts down on particular skews dominating the meta and the tournament devolving into a rock-paper-scissors of list building.

 Grey Templar wrote:

Everything should have counters, and indeed hard counters should sometimes exist. AV of certain levels counters the spam of low power high volume attacks. You should NEVER be able to damage a Titan with a lasgun under any circumstances, in the fluff or on the tabletop.
...
Skew lists aren't necessarily bad for game balance. And they tend to cause other players to build to counter them if they become meta. The only reason they really were so much of an issue is because tournament play for 40k has always been 1 list per player so everybody gets locked in at the start. If tournaments allowed you to have 2 or more potential lists it wouldn't be as big of an issue as you could counter potential skews.

Which is why most other wargames that are played competitively use the multi-list format, it just cuts down on particular skews dominating the meta and the tournament devolving into a rock-paper-scissors of list building.

I'm all for discussing sideboards, multiple lists, or some other method of cutting down on bad matchups. But that's a potentially complicated first step. Without that hypothetical first step already figured out, I wouldn't be particularly interested in returning to a version of the game where big portions of my army aren't allowed to interact with my opponent's skew list.

Alternately, if we don't go back to AV, we could at least make certain Toughness values be unwoundable by certain strength values.

Perhaps change how wounding works. Make it so to wound you roll the D6 and add the Strength to together. if you equal or exceed the targets toughness you wound it, if you are under you fail to wound. So if the toughness is 7 or more than the attacks strength you cant hurt it at all, and attacks with an equal or greater strength than toughness would auto wound. This would also be far easier to remember/teach new players. No need for the crossreference charts that GW has always had.

This would require a total shuffle of toughness values upwards to maintain the same dynamics. Most toughness values would probably need to double while most weapons would remain the same. T8 marines, T6 guardsmen. Vehicles and monsters could be high teens or even 20+ toughness. Anti-tank weapons could even go back to the old days of rolling multiple D6 to wound. Multi-melta with Strength 8+2D6 type stuff.

If someone wrote it out, I'd be willing to look at it. But on paper, that seems like a ton of work with lots of room for problem-injection to do just to say "lasguns can't kill titans." Especially when no one is regularly doing that as-is.

That said, superheavies are really awkward in 40k for a few reasons, and I'd be fine with giving them a rule that lets them ignore small arms. Not because small arms vs titans is a big problem in need of solving but because it's such a non-issue I just... don't really care.

You say you didn't like armor skews because "I can't interact with it with most of my army" yet at the same time you say "lasguns don't damage titans in practice anyway so we don't need to change it"

I say those are mutually exclusive opinions. If it was so rare for you to damage a titan with a lasgun, why would you care if it became impossible? Or is it more that you still want to throw a bucket of dice at a titan when there is nothing better to do and still get a wound out of it? Just accept that the lasguns you brought are 100% worthless and not 95% worthless.

Making it outright impossible to damage a particularly tough target via the basic wound mechanics is better and simpler than adding yet another complicated special rule.

 Grey Templar wrote:
You say you didn't like armor skews because "I can't interact with it with most of my army" yet at the same time you say "lasguns don't damage titans in practice anyway so we don't need to change it"

I say those are mutually exclusive opinions. If it was so rare for you to damage a titan with a lasgun, why would you care if it became impossible? Or is it more that you still want to throw a bucket of dice at a titan when there is nothing better to do and still get a wound out of it? Just accept that the lasguns you brought are 100% worthless and not 95% worthless.

Making it outright impossible to damage a particularly tough target via the basic wound mechanics is better and simpler than adding yet another complicated special rule.

There's a large difference in interactivity between players in "I can do nothing but stand here and die" vs "I can very likely do nothing but if I can leverage my tiny chance to do something, I can still play the game". It's not just like you're talking about lasguns either, titans would be immune to anything up to and including autocannons iirc.

 Grey Templar wrote:
You say you didn't like armor skews because "I can't interact with it with most of my army" yet at the same time you say "lasguns don't damage titans in practice anyway so we don't need to change it"

I say those are mutually exclusive opinions. If it was so rare for you to damage a titan with a lasgun, why would you care if it became impossible? Or is it more that you still want to throw a bucket of dice at a titan when there is nothing better to do and still get a wound out of it? Just accept that the lasguns you brought are 100% worthless and not 95% worthless.

Making it outright impossible to damage a particularly tough target via the basic wound mechanics is better and simpler than adding yet another complicated special rule.

I'm not all that interested in shooting lasguns at superheavies because between woundings on 6+ and the high number of Wounds that titans have, lasguns just aren't very likely to contribute enough to matter.

But what I do care about is shooting small arms at something like a rhino where each wound I take off is significant enough to feel like it was worth rolling for.

Now granted, I cared about this more last edition when we were talking about something like S4 weapons shooting at T7 vehicles. Now that bolters are wounding rhinos half as often, I'm not sure whether we've crossed the threshold into "not worth rolling for" territory.

I will say, 10th edition's changes to vehicle toughness and weapon strength have probably been a net negative for me so far. Small arms and melee attacks are less capable of interacting with vehicles in a pinch, and melta has ceased to be a reliably anti-tank weapon.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Dudeface wrote:

There's a large difference in interactivity between players in "I can do nothing but stand here and die" vs "I can very likely do nothing but if I can leverage my tiny chance to do something, I can still play the game". It's not just like you're talking about lasguns either, titans would be immune to anything up to and including autocannons iirc.

Very true, but also super heavies just sort of skew the scale of the game in weird ways. If you remove them from the equation, the units we see on the table mostly feel like they're playing in the same ballpark. A tank feels roughly comparable to a squad or two of super soldiers. Having some nuance between their stats makes sense, and you can see the Strength value needed to hurt the tank existing on the same chart as the value needed to hurt a super soldier. But then you bring knights or titans into the equation, and it starts to feel weird that guns meant to kill those things are sharing space with weapons meant to kill infantry.

It's hard for lasguns and titans to share a tabletop and not have it feel awkward one way or another, is what I'm saying.

I would say that lasguns and bolters should be incapable of hurting most if not all vehicles as well, and possibly some monsters.

Lasguns should be useless against anything that isn't a dude in some form. Bolters should only be able to damage very light skinned vehicles, and even then it is an iffy thing. Which is where armor value was perfect in the past. Rhinos could only be hurt from the rear by bolters, and things like DE skimmers were only barely damaged by bolters. Lasguns were useless against vehicles entirely as they should be.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Dudeface wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
You say you didn't like armor skews because "I can't interact with it with most of my army" yet at the same time you say "lasguns don't damage titans in practice anyway so we don't need to change it"

I say those are mutually exclusive opinions. If it was so rare for you to damage a titan with a lasgun, why would you care if it became impossible? Or is it more that you still want to throw a bucket of dice at a titan when there is nothing better to do and still get a wound out of it? Just accept that the lasguns you brought are 100% worthless and not 95% worthless.

Making it outright impossible to damage a particularly tough target via the basic wound mechanics is better and simpler than adding yet another complicated special rule.

There's a large difference in interactivity between players in "I can do nothing but stand here and die" vs "I can very likely do nothing but if I can leverage my tiny chance to do something, I can still play the game". It's not just like you're talking about lasguns either, titans would be immune to anything up to and including autocannons iirc.

Well, if a large chunk of your army is useless that is mostly on you. You made the list that didn't bring enough anti-tank.

If there are any structural issues where skew lists are overpowered in certain matchups, that is a codex issue and not a core rules issue. Ditching AV and going to straight toughness where anything can hurt anything is just lazy design. And its quite immersion breaking for weak attacks to even have the chance of doing something vs stuff they have no business hurting realistically. Even competitive players want to have some immersion, otherwise they'd go play chess.

WW2 mini-gamers wouldn't tolerate rifles and pistols being able to hurt tanks, neither should we.

Granted, the current system isn't all bad. Vehicles having wounds is a good idea for balance purposes. Losing your expensive tank to a lucky one-shot, while very realistic, was always a feels bad moment.

I feel like a hybrid which brought back AV, kept wounds, and had some sort of chart to roll on like the old damage chart as well would be nice. Maybe you roll on the damage chart once your wounds drop below a threshold. Like every 1/3 or 1/4 of the vehicles wounds it rolls on a damage chart, with each threshold adding a penalty to the roll to represent the vehicle becoming more likely to detonate.

Something like this,

Vehicle Catastrophic damage chart(1D6): Each time a vehicle drops below a 25% increment of its total health(rounding up) it must roll on the following chart. The following penalties apply to the roll.

Vehicle is between 75% and 50% health: no penalty
Vehicle is between 25 and 50% health: -2 penalty
Vehicle is between 25 and 1% health: -3 penalty

5-6: Nothing
3-4: Crew Injured: Vehicle suffers -2 BS and WS for 1 turn
1-2: Immobilized: Vehicle may not move or make melee attacks for 1 turn
0: Fire: Vehicle suffers 1D3 wounds with no saves allowed
-1 or less: Ammo detonation: Vehicle is destroyed

Certain weapons could have special rules imposing penalties on this chart, certain vehicles could have innate bonuses on the chart, certain weapons or rules could force a roll on the chart even if a threshold hasn't been passed.

This would also incentivize repairing mechanics, as even a few extra wounds could bring a vehicle out of the danger zone.

 Grey Templar wrote:


Well, if a large chunk of your army is useless that is mostly on you. You made the list that didn't bring enough anti-tank.

That's the thing though. Unless you and your opponent are trading lists in advance or you happen to be really familiar with their collection, you don't know how much anti-tank is "enough." A vanilla list that brings a reasonable amount of AT for a non-skew list might find itself woefully lacking against a skew list. So you either:
A.) Continue to take a vanilla amount of AT and end up having bad matchups against skew lists. Or
B.) Start erring on the side of caution and load up on AT everywhere you can. Which means that non-AT options see less play and list diversity in general is reduced. Which stinks.

If there are any structural issues where skew lists are overpowered in certain matchups, that is a codex issue and not a core rules issue.

Well, no. Army construction is covered under core rules, and there currently aren't any rules in place to address the possibility of a bad matchup resulting from a skew list. A codex can reasonably have a bunch of different tank options in it. The issue is when your army can be composed of basically nothing but those tanks and there aren't any other rules to address the possible resulting bad matchup.

Ditching AV and going to straight toughness where anything can hurt anything is just lazy design. And its quite immersion breaking for weak attacks to even have the chance of doing something vs stuff they have no business hurting realistically. Even competitive players want to have some immersion, otherwise they'd go play chess.

Counterpoint: AV was overly-complicated design. It was a whole second attack resolution system just for targets that happened to be made of metal. That didn't always apply to units made of metal. Even ignoring the weirdness of dreadknights and riptides being "monstrous creatures" instead of vehicles, it was still odd that a carnifex or wraith lord got an armor save against an autocannon wound while a rhino didn't for some reason. It just lead to a bunch of have and have-not scenarios that didn't really make fluffy sense. There's not a lot of obvious difference between a wraith lord (aka an "eldar dreadnaught" ) and a marine dreadnaught that demands a wildly different attack resolution mechanic for the latter.

WW2 mini-gamers wouldn't tolerate rifles and pistols being able to hurt tanks, neither should we.

WW2 games don't have nearly as much variety or weirdness in their weapons as the 40k does. I'm willing to believe that fully automatic rocket propelled grenade launchers are capable of doing some minor damage to the janky space tank if it means matchups are less one-sided.

Granted, the current system isn't all bad. Vehicles having wounds is a good idea for balance purposes. Losing your expensive tank to a lucky one-shot, while very realistic, was always a feels bad moment.

Worth noting: the ability to be one-shot was partially there to balance out the fact that your vehicle was basically immune to most of the enemy's shooting. If you bring back immunity to small arms fire without also bringing back the possible feels-bad of dying to your opponent's first shot, then you'd be looking at functionally making vehicles more durable than ever.

I feel like a hybrid which brought back AV, kept wounds, and had some sort of chart to roll on like the old damage chart as well would be nice. Maybe you roll on the damage chart once your wounds drop below a threshold. Like every 1/3 or 1/4 of the vehicles wounds it rolls on a damage chart, with each threshold adding a penalty to the roll to represent the vehicle becoming more likely to detonate.

Something like this,

Vehicle Catastrophic damage chart(1D6): Each time a vehicle drops below a 25% increment of its total health(rounding up) it must roll on the following chart. The following penalties apply to the roll.

Vehicle is between 75% and 50% health: no penalty
Vehicle is between 25 and 50% health: -2 penalty
Vehicle is between 25 and 1% health: -3 penalty

5-6: Nothing
3-4: Crew Injured: Vehicle suffers -2 BS and WS for 1 turn
1-2: Immobilized: Vehicle may not move or make melee attacks for 1 turn
0: Fire: Vehicle suffers 1D3 wounds with no saves allowed
-1 or less: Ammo detonation: Vehicle is destroyed

Certain weapons could have special rules imposing penalties on this chart, certain vehicles could have innate bonuses on the chart, certain weapons or rules could force a roll on the chart even if a threshold hasn't been passed.

This would also incentivize repairing mechanics, as even a few extra wounds could bring a vehicle out of the danger zone.

I've pitched something similar in the past. My suggestion was slightly less complicated with the intention being to have damage to large units be a thing without requiring quite as much bookkeeping as in pre-8th editions. Basically:
* Instead of the wound brackets of 8th and 9th, you suffer vehicle damage when your vehicle is reduced below a certain number of Wounds.
* Then the player who owns the damaged unit selects one of the following results (or rolls randomly; hadn't decided): immobilized, weapon destroyed, stunned.
* Immobilized means your Movement becomes 0" for the rest of the game and you can't charge.
* Weapon Destroyed means your opponent chooses one of your weapons, and it becomes unusable for the rest of the game.
* Stunned means you can't move or attack until the end of your next turn, but then you go back to normal afterwards.

The thinking behind letting the controlling player choose was that it meant you could avoid being completely screwed by a result. I.e., no losing the railgun on your hammerhead. I'd probably have players only suffer vehicle damage once at either half or something like a quarter of their full wounds. (So a rhino would roll at either 5 wound or at like, 2 or 3 wounds remaining). Superheavies would potentially take vehicle damage at multiple points as a way of rewarding players for making progress against them.

I tend to agree that tanks and similar/stronger should be immune to small arms fire. That way infantry have no option but to flee or maneuver around a tank that breaks through their line.
I do also like the vehicle statuses of Oldhammer but also agree that it should be simplified a la Wyldhunt's suggestion.

In my opinion the problem of needing too much antitank in your army stems from there not being enough AT options for infantry.
Remember in Star Wars that Luke single-handedly took down an AT-AT essentially by attaching a melta bomb to it. Titan walkers could face the same threat: being swarmed by hormagaunts that can climb up and tear their way in.

Now, I doubt every faction's troops should suddenly get melta bombs or even krak grenades, and I don't think fire warriors climbing on the back of a land raider can do much but enjoy the view.
What if vehicles became susceptible to small arms once reduced to half health, via their armor being compromised and a weak point opening up? Couple that with more AT options and an infantry-heavy list just needs to protect their AT units long enough to weaken the vehicle-heavy list enough to finish them off.

Also as an aside, any sort of damage-status chart either needs to be generic enough to encompass tanks, walkers, and monsters, or else each of those types would need special rules to bypass certain statuses, like monsters never being immobilized.

A few scattered thoughts:

* The real issue here is that skew lists result in bad matchups. So a good solution is probably one that addresses that problem specifically.

* If you spread around extra AT to most/many units to the point that basically your entire army (including units that don't specialize tanks) can hurt tanks, then you're sort of just doing a bunch of work to end up back where we are now, right? You're just doing X damage to tanks with your dire avengers via their newly-added bespoke rule or grenade profile or whatever instead of with their existing attack profiles.

Or I guess maybe you end up functionally making tanks less durable overall if you end up adding more AT threat with the new rules than you took away by making them immune to small arms.

Sincere question for those who don't like bolters hurting tanks: would it be preferable to you to have a bunch of of new grenade profiles and special rules to hurt tanks if the end result is basically just the current status quo? It's a lot of work for basically no functional difference, but you'd be able to say that tanks are immune to bolters.

* Actually, fire warriors *could* climb on the backs of landraiders to hurt them once upon a time. Ah, EMP grenades. I miss you and haywire grenades.

* Making vehicles susceptible to small arms at half health would be fluffy, but it feels likely a slightly complicated add-on for what would feel like a very similar result to what we have now. No one is one-shotting land raiders with a volley of lasguns. Maybe lasguns scratch the paint if you point them at a healthy land raider, but they're probably not having any mechanical impact on the the LR's performance unless you're pairing them with some dedicated anti-tank guns. At which point you can just fluff it as the lasguns aggrevating the damage done by the anti-tank guns. Shooting through the hole a krak missile made or chipping away at a damaged patch of hull.

* Monsters being immobilized makes plenty of sense to me. But agreed that a hypothetical damage status chart would want to be generic enough to work for both vehicles and monsters.

My stake in this argument is that I actually enjoy skew lists. Nostalgia for Warcraft 3 trying to run an army of skeletons, or tower rushing, etc. A balanced army should be a natural counter to a skew list with the latter only having a narrow path to victory: going all in on its skewed strength.

And to reiterate what I mentioned earlier, the fun part about vehicles being immune to small arms is that if you manage to break a tank through your enemy's front line, you have an opportunity to push their back line around, causing them to flee and take cover. Currently, any infantry you can't threaten directly would pour small arms fire into you and fish for 6's. It might not cause significant damage but I argue it's the feeling that matters here, not the numbers.
Now if all those squads only had krak-level AT grenades instead of just being able to shoot lasers, they'd have to risk getting close enough to lob it.

I did forget about haywire grenades. They were before my time and my Tau only have puny flashbangs.

And my point about monsters not getting immobilized is that a tank losing a tread is immobilized, whereas a carnifex losing one or even both legs could still crawl with its arms. I think that's sort of a natural advantage monsters should have. But then there's walkers and if they have jump jets...

 Wyldhunt wrote:
A few scattered thoughts:

* The real issue here is that skew lists result in bad matchups. So a good solution is probably one that addresses that problem specifically.

You have to allow for the all tank lists because otherwise you'd be punishing the players who like that and have bought the models, likewise people who have spammed infantry would be punished after buying a bajillion infantry. Banning skew lists also would just end up with everybody having homogenous lists where all lists no matter the faction end up being 4-6 units of infantry, 3-5 tanks, 1-2 flyers, etc... and are all just boring and samey. At which point you might as well just not give any choice in how lists are made.

Granted, the way they've gotten rid of point costs for upgrades is almost like that anyway. You just take "the best" upgrades and play that.

I think the real solution is sideboards. You just gotta bite the bullet on having multiple lists in a tournament. Maybe even give some tactical options.

Like, you may have up to 3 lists for the tournament. Opponent gets to see your lists before picking theirs. If you have 1 list, you always play that list. If you have 2 or 3, both players secretly choose their list after seeing the opponents. If a player has 3 lists, the opponent can ban one of their lists from being chosen unless that player has only 1 list.

So a skew player could risk only taking a skew list, but they'd have no ban. The more lists you bring the more flexibility you have, but if you have 3 one could get banned.

This is honestly on 40k tournament organizers and not on GW. I think the only reason they haven't done this is because 40k is a very expensive hobby and they feel this could potentially exclude a lot of players if they don't have the ability to bring 3 lists to a tournament. I don't think this is a good excuse tho. You can still participate with fewer lists, and the vast majority of people who player in tournaments are going to have a large enough collection to do multiple lists.

Pretty much every miniature game tournament, and indeed even non-miniature game competitions, has sideboards for a very good reason. Skew happens, this is the only real solution.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Dominar_Jameson_V wrote:

And my point about monsters not getting immobilized is that a tank losing a tread is immobilized, whereas a carnifex losing one or even both legs could still crawl with its arms. I think that's sort of a natural advantage monsters should have. But then there's walkers and if they have jump jets...

Exactly. A monster doesn't use the vehicle mechanics and would just be a beefy normal model. 100% effective till it dies.

Walkers are the odd bridge between monsters and vehicles, but I think the old walker rules were just fine at doing that. No using rear armor of a walker in melee unless its immobilized, takes damage like a vehicle, but is generally squishier than a normal tank.

Which does make sense. A mechanical monster should be different to one made of flesh and blood.

Dominar_Jameson_V wrote:My stake in this argument is that I actually enjoy skew lists. Nostalgia for Warcraft 3 trying to run an army of skeletons, or tower rushing, etc. A balanced army should be a natural counter to a skew list with the latter only having a narrow path to victory: going all in on its skewed strength.

The thing is, that's kind of the opposite of how skew lists operate in 40k. If you bring a list that hits hard and is immune to half your opponent's firepower, you're just going to wreck 'em and have an easier time winning than if you'd brought a vanilla list.

And to reiterate what I mentioned earlier, the fun part about vehicles being immune to small arms is that if you manage to break a tank through your enemy's front line, you have an opportunity to push their back line around, causing them to flee and take cover.

Tank shock is kind of its own can of worms that I'll leave for another discussion.

Now if all those squads only had krak-level AT grenades instead of just being able to shoot lasers, they'd have to risk getting close enough to lob it.

I'm open to looking at an overhaul of a ton of units to spread AT around more, but you're still looking at either increasing the amount of AT in a vanilla army (punishing vehicles in a non-skew list) or breaking even on the amount of AT in an army (in which case, all that work functionally just gets you back where you started but with more rules to remember.)

And my point about monsters not getting immobilized is that a tank losing a tread is immobilized, whereas a carnifex losing one or even both legs could still crawl with its arms. I think that's sort of a natural advantage monsters should have. But then there's walkers and if they have jump jets...

Exactly. A monster doesn't use the vehicle mechanics and would just be a beefy normal model. 100% effective till it dies.

Walkers are the odd bridge between monsters and vehicles, but I think the old walker rules were just fine at doing that. No using rear armor of a walker in melee unless its immobilized, takes damage like a vehicle, but is generally squishier than a normal tank.

Which does make sense. A mechanical monster should be different to one made of flesh and blood.

I don't follow whatever logic you two are seeing. Maybe a carnifex drags itself by its fore-arms. Maybe a walker (which is a vehicle) does too. Maybe a skimmer with a damaged repulsor unit manages to shakily keep flying in vaguely the right direction. Weapons (and limbs) can be ripped off of both vehicles and giant bugs/daemons. Mechanical systems can stutter, and biological organisms can be stunned. In practical terms, vehicles and monsters are more alike than different, especially in terms of how they behave when damaged.

Grey Templar wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:
A few scattered thoughts:

* The real issue here is that skew lists result in bad matchups. So a good solution is probably one that addresses that problem specifically.

You have to allow for the all tank lists because otherwise you'd be punishing the players who like that and have bought the models, likewise people who have spammed infantry would be punished after buying a bajillion infantry. Banning skew lists also would just end up with everybody having homogenous lists where all lists no matter the faction end up being 4-6 units of infantry, 3-5 tanks, 1-2 flyers, etc... and are all just boring and samey. At which point you might as well just not give any choice in how lists are made.

Note that I'm not necessarily saying "ban skew lists." I'm saying that skew lists currently cause problems that ought to be addressed, and making skew lists immune to half their opponent's ranged attacked doesn't help the situation.

I think the real solution is sideboards.

Sideboards could be good. I'm not even coming at it from a tournament perspective. I already bring two lists to the game store sometimes so my opponent and I can have a game with the list that seems like the best match. Formalizing something like that could have its merits. That's its own topic though.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
...

I'll admit I've never seen a skewed list since I've only ever played against my friends, but it is a sign of a broken system if one is a flat out advantage over a balanced list. However I still feel like all those interesting vehicle traits of olde, including ignoring low-strength attacks, can be properly balanced just by making sure every faction has multiple anti-tank options.
One AT hand grenade for each of the conventional troop units shouldn't spell doom for every transport or skimmer on the board, and it would give those ubiquitous troops the choice of retreating and regrouping or risking getting in lobbing range for an attack. I would prefer that over allowing those troops to just take potshots in retreat, or fish for 6's when they aren't being targeted.
For those races not known for pulling pins from grenades, there are lore reasons why their claws can cut through tank armor when a lasgun cannot. Tyranid claws are known for it, Daemons should defy physics, and I think even those Necron scarabs do something, like biting and burrowing in?

Switching gears, I think Grey Templar's and my reasoning for immobilizing vehicles and not monsters is that vehicles suffer component failure while monsters and beasts struggle until they're dead. A tank can still be 100% lethal even with a thrown track and unable to move, but I expect a monster to weaken with its degrading profile. Both can be stunned of course but i like vehicles to have a more binary status.

 Wyldhunt wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
The game is going to require a big redesign to make vehicles good again, or even just feel right. But going back to armor would be a step in the right direction. Yes, it would require bases on vehicles and/or a template.

Honestly, the games design has gone downhill since 5th. A few good additions were made, but they keep messing up the good parts.

Note that returning to Armor Values (rather than just Toughness values with rules for flanking) is its own distinct topic with its own distinct problems.

I'm guessing everyone is pretty tired of hearing me ramble about why AV lowering interactivity between units and promoting skew lists is bad, right?

How does AV promote skew? Fact is that it doesn't whilest the s-t table atm does promote skew en masse.

I think it's helpful to look at what we're trying to abstract to avoid getting lost in a game mechanics maze.

The whole point of armored vehicles is that they are effectively immune to small arms. If you take that away, to defeat their purpose and undermine the integrity of the rules.

This invulnerability need not be absolute, however, and there are in-game ways to counter it. Obviously, there are specialized anti-tank weapons that are man (or eldar) portable, there are other vehicles, and claws and such.

AV works best because it represents how vehicles truly work - armor is thicker in the front, weaker on the sides and rear, and you can blow off the tracks, rendering it immobile. You get these rules at a minimal cost in complexity because they are so intuitive.

As for tank columns being unbalancing, that's on the game designer, not tanks or AV. Does the game provide sufficient cover to allow infantry to swarm the vehicles? I'm thinking of the elaborate modifications required to US tanks in the Pacific.

Monster/alien powers speak for themselves.

I'm not current, so I'm not sure where things are, but in the older edition, pure armor armies had problems because of these weaknesses, especially to monstrous opponents who could tear them to pieces. Characters with power fists likewise made scrap out of them. This was why armor needed infantry support and combined arms was (and is) the way to go in real life.

The truth is, the more tactical options you have in-game, the less dominant force selection becomes. If heavy bolters can ding Rhino rear-facing armor, forward rushes without dealing with flank elements become suicidal. Tanks should fear for flank and rear shots from light heavy weapons.

It sounds like GW continues to make army selection more important than tactics, which is a shame, but nothing new.

We don't need AV for that, simply a tighter S/T table and facing rules would suffice.

As a fundamental point I dislike having an entirely different wounding system. You want small arms being unable to hurt tanks? fine but you can do that by modifing S/T.

That aside if we are going to make vehicles and monsters more resistant against small arms, that should also be balanced with making them more vulnerable to AT weapons.

If a balanced list is supposed to be able to counter a skew list, that meants AT units need to be able to get borderline absurd returns when used against vehicle and monsters. As in a HWT or a Devastator Squad with lascannons having a good chance of outright deleting a tank across the board.

 Tyran wrote:
As a fundamental point I dislike having an entirely different wounding system. You want small arms being unable to hurt tanks? fine but you can do that by modifing S/T.

They are fundamentally different things, so there should be different rules.

When you try to treat an APC the same as a carnifex, problems you will have.

AV is the best solution, but probably unworkable in the current edition. Failing that, there should be some bonus for rear/flank shots, but I'm getting a sense that the abstraction level in the game at this point is pretty huge.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:

 Tyran wrote:
As a fundamental point I dislike having an entirely different wounding system. You want small arms being unable to hurt tanks? fine but you can do that by modifing S/T.

They are fundamentally different things, so there should be different rules.

When you try to treat an APC the same as a carnifex, problems you will have.

The fundamental difference is that one carries people and thus should have rules to carry people, but durability wise they aren't fundamentally different. A lascannon, melta or missile launcher should be able to kill both and autocannons should also be somewhat effective against both and both should ignore small arms.

But a Carnifex and a Dread? role wise and thus rule wise they are pretty much the same thing. An Exocrine and a Leman Russ Executioner, the same thing really, a Tyrannofex and a Rogal Dorn? mostly the same thing aside of some wargear differences.

 Tyran wrote:

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:

 Tyran wrote:
As a fundamental point I dislike having an entirely different wounding system. You want small arms being unable to hurt tanks? fine but you can do that by modifing S/T.

They are fundamentally different things, so there should be different rules.

When you try to treat an APC the same as a carnifex, problems you will have.

The fundamental difference is that one carries people and thus should have rules to carry people, but durability wise they aren't fundamentally different. A lascannon, melta or missile launcher should be able to kill both and autocannons should also be somewhat effective against both and both should ignore small arms.

But a Carnifex and a Dread? role wise and thus rule wise they are pretty much the same thing. An Exocrine and a Leman Russ Executioner, the same thing really, a Tyrannofex and a Rogal Dorn? mostly the same thing aside of some wargear differences.

Is there a difference between a draft horse and a 2 person car? Of course there is. It is just absurd to have vehicles and monsters share damage mechanics. A creature is a living thing, a vehicle is an inanimate object. That alone IMO justified the old AV system.

Is it more complicated than just using the same Toughness system for everything? Yes, but I don't think it is any more complicated then having a toughness system where vehicles have degrading stat blocks based on their wounds, and potentially different toughness values for different facings. If anything, making it entirely different makes it easier to remember because nobody will get their wires crossed between a vehicle and a normal unit.

If anything, the AV system was simpler than the SvT system that has/is still used. To pen AV it was simply dice+strength of the attack, if equal to AV its a glance. If greater its a pen. Just simple addition.

Wounding Toughness is a complicated "If str is double, wound on 2+. If str higher but not double, 3+. If str is equal, 4+. If str is less than, but not less than half its 5+. If str is less than half, its 6+"

If the justification for getting rid of AV was "Its too complicated", we should have gotten rid of Toughness and just went with AV for everything. Its the far simpler damage system.

For the record I believe AT weapons should be just as effective against monstrous creatures as vehicles, and small arms as ineffective, although a lasgun to the eyeball is probably fair from a 6 hit, 6 wound, failed save. The vehicle status chart is more thematic and helps set machines apart from monsters, even if it isn't completely necessary.

 Tyran wrote:
If a balanced list is supposed to be able to counter a skew list, that meants AT units need to be able to get borderline absurd returns when used against vehicle and monsters. As in a HWT or a Devastator Squad with lascannons having a good chance of outright deleting a tank across the board.

As long as we're on the topic of overhauling the entire game for the greater good, AT weapons should have their own downsides like being ineffective against hordes.

I'll admit I've never seen a skewed list since I've only ever played against my friends, but it is a sign of a broken system if one is a flat out advantage over a balanced list.

It sure is!

However I still feel like all those interesting vehicle traits of olde, including ignoring low-strength attacks, can be properly balanced just by making sure every faction has multiple anti-tank options.

A few things here. First of all, are these AT "options" competing with non-AT options for slots/to be taken in the list? If so, then this risks invalidating non-AT options. A classic "you'll never take a flamer because you need every melta you can get" situation.

Second, for a given enemy list, you need X amount of AT to comfortably take on that list. Against a vanilla list, maybe you only need 7 AT. Against a skew list, maybe you need 12. If you take 12 AT in case of skew lists but face a vanilla list, your opponent's tanks are going to get deleted instantly which isn't great. If you take 7AT and face a skew list, you're going to have a bad time because you can't meaningfully engage them. Adding more AT to your list by giving bonus AT to a bunch of units changes how much AT you have, but it doesn't help ensure your amount of AT is appropriate for whatever list your opponent is bringing. Thus you end up with games where half your list is just there to stand around and die on objectives (not appealing) or where half your codex's options don't really exist because you have to pass over the anti-infantry options in favor of the AT options.

Third, I do wonder if people would actually enjoy having AT options all over the place. Like, if part of the appeal of taking a tank is that it's resistant to incoming attacks, does that get diminished when every enemy squad is throwing anti-tank grenades at you? You're immune to lasguns or bolters, sure, but now you live in a world where every unit has a way of hurting you efficiently.

Switching gears, I think Grey Templar's and my reasoning for immobilizing vehicles and not monsters is that vehicles suffer component failure while monsters and beasts struggle until they're dead. A tank can still be 100% lethal even with a thrown track and unable to move, but I expect a monster to weaken with its degrading profile. Both can be stunned of course but i like vehicles to have a more binary status.

A carnifex or wraith lord or daemon prince with their legs blown off can still point their guns and shoot. A vehicle can have its accuracy diminished because of damage to the mechanisms that let it swivel its guns or to the firing mechanisms. Bodies are just machines made out of meat. In the grimdark future of the 41st millenium where most monsters are too tough to care about silly things like blood loss and exposed organs, losing a weapon or a limb is pretty much the same as a vehicle losing a turret or a tread.

How does AV promote skew? Fact is that it doesn't whilest the s-t table atm does promote skew en masse.

Because having most of your army being literally immune to a large portion of your opponent's offense is an advantage. If your opponent didn't lean hard into AT to counter your skew list, you can comfortable kill off what AT units they do have and then spend the rest of the game essentially invulnerable.

As for tank columns being unbalancing, that's on the game designer, not tanks or AV.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here. I'm not trying to assign blame, but it is what it is. Skew lists have problems. Parking lots are a form of skew list. Making those skew lists even skewier by making them immune to small arms exhasperates the non-interactivity of such lists.

I'm not current, so I'm not sure where things are, but in the older edition, pure armor armies had problems because of these weaknesses, especially to monstrous opponents who could tear them to pieces. Characters with power fists likewise made scrap out of them. This was why armor needed infantry support and combined arms was (and is) the way to go in real life.

You're describing making vehicles hyper-vulnerable to small amounts of AT. i.e. one-hit-kills. This was viewed by many as unfun back when we had AV. Your expensive land raider that you took specifically to be durable could die to the first lucky bright lance shot sent its way. Ditto your expensive hammerhead, fireprism, etc. Currently, most vehicles can't get taken out so easily by most anti-tank weapons, so when they do die it feels like your opponent had to invest something into killing it.

Also, MCs are no longer automatically good at killing vehicles, and vehicles can shoot their big guns even in combat right now. And we're not doing the ham-fisted thing from 5th where only troops can score. So lots of the weaknesses of vehicles have been mitigated in recent editions.

The truth is, the more tactical options you have in-game, the less dominant force selection becomes. If heavy bolters can ding Rhino rear-facing armor, forward rushes without dealing with flank elements become suicidal. Tanks should fear for flank and rear shots from light heavy weapons.

I mean, in practice heavy bolters usually aren't getting shots on rear armor. Double so now that weapon arcs aren't a thing. Plus, rhinos usually aren't the issue; it's the heavy-hitters that can generally sit in the backfield while putting out damage that you have to worry about.

We don't need AV for that, simply a tighter S/T table and facing rules would suffice.

As a fundamental point I dislike having an entirely different wounding system. You want small arms being unable to hurt tanks? fine but you can do that by modifing S/T.

That aside if we are going to make vehicles and monsters more resistant against small arms, that should also be balanced with making them more vulnerable to AT weapons.

If a balanced list is supposed to be able to counter a skew list, that meants AT units need to be able to get borderline absurd returns when used against vehicle and monsters. As in a HWT or a Devastator Squad with lascannons having a good chance of outright deleting a tank across the board.

Well put all around. I don't love the idea of makign vehicles immune to bolters, but if we must, we can do that in a much simpler, less messy way than welding on a second attack resolution process. And yeah, land raiders dying to the first round of shooting from devastators was how vehicle interactivity was handled before. Is that what people want to return to? (Honest question; you are allowed to want what you want.)

 Grey Templar wrote:

Is there a difference between a draft horse and a 2 person car? Of course there is. It is just absurd to have vehicles and monsters share damage mechanics. A creature is a living thing, a vehicle is an inanimate object. That alone IMO justified the old AV system.

And yet Necron Warriors always had a T value instead of AV.

At the scale 40k plays there is little point in differentiating monsters and vehicles, specially because both have the same roles.

Is it more complicated than just using the same Toughness system for everything? Yes, but I don't think it is any more complicated then having a toughness system where vehicles have degrading stat blocks based on their wounds, and potentially different toughness values for different facings. If anything, making it entirely different makes it easier to remember because nobody will get their wires crossed between a vehicle and a normal unit.

If anything, the AV system was simpler than the SvT system that has/is still used. To pen AV it was simply dice+strength of the attack, if equal to AV its a glance. If greater its a pen. Just simple addition.

Wounding Toughness is a complicated "If str is double, wound on 2+. If str higher but not double, 3+. If str is equal, 4+. If str is less than, but not less than half its 5+. If str is less than half, its 6+"

If the justification for getting rid of AV was "Its too complicated", we should have gotten rid of Toughness and just went with AV for everything. Its the far simpler damage system.

AV isn't a damage system, it is a wounding one. The actual damage system was the Damage Vehicle and giving everyone down to Gretchins a Damage table would get absurdly complicated fast.

Moreover because it doesn't care for AP it would be impossible to differentiate Orks and Marines with AV. So no, we cannot replace T with AV unless you are planning in adding Sv on top of AV.

 Tyran wrote:
And yet Necron Warriors always had a T value instead of AV.

In previous editions special infantry had AV, which was a neat way to set them apart and reinforce the mechanical side of things.

At the scale 40k plays there is little point in differentiating monsters and vehicles, specially because both have the same roles.

So carnifexes can serve as troop transports and tanks can engage multiple opponents in hand to hand combat?

The game has changed lot, then.

AV was not a problem when the game hadn't exploded into dozens of sub-lists and however many bolt gun flavors there are now.

There were specialized weapons to take out infantry, others to take down tanks/monsters, and then all-comers ones like the Heavy Plasma Gun which could pretty much handle everything, but had a slow rate of fire.

Obviously, I prefer that version, but something like it remains possible.

Commissar von Toussaint wrote:

 Tyran wrote:
And yet Necron Warriors always had a T value instead of AV.

In previous editions special infantry had AV, which was a neat way to set them apart and reinforce the mechanical side of things.

Are you advocating for a return to that?

At the scale 40k plays there is little point in differentiating monsters and vehicles, specially because both have the same roles.

So carnifexes can serve as troop transports and tanks can engage multiple opponents in hand to hand combat?

...There are currently rules for organic transports in the form of whatever the 'nid drop pods are called and maybe their superheavies if those still have rules in 10th. Theoretically, there's nothing stopping a monstrous creature from giving a ride to infantry. The exodites fandex I'm tinkering with has dinosaurs with platforms and netting on their backs that do exactly that. Tanks slamming into multiple opponents doesn't strike me as ridiculous, and obviously we have walkers that punch things all the time.

AV was not a problem when the game hadn't exploded into dozens of sub-lists and however many bolt gun flavors there are now.

I'm earnestly attempting and failing to understand the connection you're making between AV and bolter variants. I'd argue AV *was* less-than-perfect for quite a while (certainly between 5th when I started playing and 7th when it was last used.) If something like 8th/9th edition intercessor bolters had existed back then, they wouldn't have interacted with AV at all except in the sense that the Assault 3 gun would give the wielder an extra shot if you happened to be shooting at AV 10. Sub-lists have existed in one form or another for quite a while now (formations in 7th if nothing else), and they don't inherently relate to AV.

Are you just yelling at clouds, or am I missing something?

There were specialized weapons to take out infantry, others to take down tanks/monsters, and then all-comers ones like the Heavy Plasma Gun which could pretty much handle everything, but had a slow rate of fire.

Last edition, you wanted cheap guns with lots of shots to take on hordes, melta and other high strength/damage weapons weapons were much most points efficient at dealing with tanks/monsters than other weapons. Plasma was better against tanks/monsters than most non-specialized weapons, but wasn't nearly as good against them as the specialized weapons *and* was pretty efficient at clearing out heavy infantry. What you're describing existed less than a year ago.

Heck. It still exists now. You don't use a lascannon to clear a horde of gaunts, and you don't expect bolters to do any heavy lifting against a land raider. With the possible exception of the all-rounder weapons which have become kind of bad against actual tanks due to not having their Strength values scaled up.

There is no fundamental reason why a robot, a monster or a tank need different mechanics to one another.

They interact with the game in the same way - they shoot, they punch, they move.

The conversation is about scale - large things should be treated differently to small things.

Small things are removed when they take damage because they can't continue fighting whether dead or not. Large things lose capability as they take damage but are not removed.

That's it.

A tank track, robot leg, monster leg, all get damaged all affect mobility.

A tank gun, robot gun, monster gun all get damaged and affect shooting.

Etc.

A tanks fuel gets shot and blows up..instant death.

A monsters brain gets shot. Instant death.

There is nothing unique in the game that requires their rules be separated.

 Hellebore wrote:
There is no fundamental reason why a robot, a monster or a tank need different mechanics to one another.

They interact with the game in the same way - they shoot, they punch, they move.

The conversation is about scale - large things should be treated differently to small things.

Small things are removed when they take damage because they can't continue fighting whether dead or not. Large things lose capability as they take damage but are not removed.

That's it.

A tank track, robot leg, monster leg, all get damaged all affect mobility.

A tank gun, robot gun, monster gun all get damaged and affect shooting.

Etc.

A tanks fuel gets shot and blows up..instant death.

A monsters brain gets shot. Instant death.

There is nothing unique in the game that requires their rules be separated.

Tell you want. I'll give you infinite 9mm ammunition. Lets see how many shots it takes you to kill the crew of an M2 Bradly. Hint: you and the crew will die of old age before you do anything to it.

Why would a Carnifex have less/worse armor than a Rhino?

Because its fleshy and not made of metal. It'll probably have a lot of wounds, or even maybe more wounds, but in terms of what can actually cause damage it should be much more vulnerable to low strength attacks

 Grey Templar wrote:
Because its fleshy and not made of metal. It'll probably have a lot of wounds, or even maybe more wounds, but in terms of what can actually cause damage it should be much more vulnerable to low strength attacks

Why?
It’s not human fleshy.
Its fists and claws can rend right through terminator, tank, and dreadnought armor.
It’s a bio-engineered device of warfare.

And, if we look at the stats…
Carnifex has a 2+ armor
Repulsor has a 3+ armor
The Carnifex literally has better armor than a tank.

 JNAProductions wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
Because its fleshy and not made of metal. It'll probably have a lot of wounds, or even maybe more wounds, but in terms of what can actually cause damage it should be much more vulnerable to low strength attacks

Why?
It’s not human fleshy.
Its fists and claws can rend right through terminator, tank, and dreadnought armor.
It’s a bio-engineered device of warfare.

And, if we look at the stats…
Carnifex has a 2+ armor
Repulsor has a 3+ armor
The Carnifex literally has better armor than a tank.

Tanks didn't get armor saves back in the day when AV was a thing. And so does a squishy human who happens to be wearing Artificer armor or something.

But if you can't understand how a living creature is different from an armored vehicle I really can't help you.

I suppose the best way to differentiate it is that a vehicle is something that isn't alive and is piloted by something. A monster is something that is in and of itself alive.