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I hear this too often. A 1-in-6 chance to completely destroy a vehicle isn't realistic at all. A lot of my friends play imperial armies, and a couple of them play tau and eldar, and they all agree.

What do you think? I personally think there should be an additional roll after you roll a 6 on the vehicle damage chart.

No i think it works i have had lascannons bounce off rhinos all game and on the other hand i lost armour 14 landraiders in the first turn , i think it works out well overall .
The system has its up and downs but they tend to even themselves out .

An extra D6 to get that 'Exploded' Result is just too unbalanced. Mech armies would sweep anything else off the field. In my honest opinion the rules are fairly balanced as is.

Tanks were made to take hits, Heavy weapons were made to take out tanks

anyway, an Imperial Guardsman need to roll a 4 to hit a (heretical) Leman Russ, a 6 to cause any damage and even with another 6 they could only bust the treads. Eldar Grav Tanks arn't made of so many layers of metal, seems fair to me

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gF-VOu4nyTY&feature=fvw

Its pretty good now, an additional roll after would be way to much.

There is not a one-in-six chance of blowing up a vehicle. Take into account the chance of hitting (or missing depending on BS) and penetrating, and the alterations things like AP can make and the odds of any given shot blowing a tank up diminish rapidly.

F'rex a quick back-of-a-beermat style calculation indicates that a Sister of Battle shooting a Rhino with a Melta (outside of half range) has only an 11% chance of blowing it up. That sounds about right.

You must remember that, in the present day our vehicle armour tech is far better than our man-portable anti-armour tech.

That is very much NOT the case in the 41st millenium, where all but the most almighty weapons can be hauled around by one guy (sometimes with power armour).

In the 41st millenium the race between armour and weapons is being won by weapons and that's just how it is.


Know what the real issue is? If you have ten guys sitting a a tank that suddenly explodes, odds are six of them will be just fine, standing there in the crater and looking startled...

Warhammer is a D6 based system so they have to do what they can, there used to be a separate damage chart for ordnance weapons but that's gone now. Beside look at 'Ard boyz, mech is already really good & doesn't need to be better.

I think you're being obtuse.

Glancing hits can never (unless it is open-topped) explode a vehicle. So, that is pretty ok, seeing what a penetrating hit is.

Azezel wrote:
Know what the real issue is? If you have ten guys sitting a a tank that suddenly explodes, odds are six of them will be just fine, standing there in the crater and looking startled...

+1

Samus_aran115 wrote:What do you think?

If they're all in agreement, I think you're friends are being whiners. It's a 1 in 6 chance of the tank exploding... AFTER its had something successfully blow right through its armor. What's not realistic about it?

I'd say it's pretty realistic. While they may not take up 1/6 of the vehicle, fuel tanks are generally very large, especially on armored vehicles. Not that the fuel tanks are the only things that would cause an explosion if struck.

The old vehicle damage chart was better. 3 was immobilized and stunned, 4 and 5 were wrecked, and 6 was exploded. Then you had to deal with entanglement (which makes complete sense).

Now? vehicles are far too difficult to kill. Not only that, but they got a hell of a lot cheaper.

Vehicles were close to useless last edition- too easy to kill, too expensive, and too restrictive on how they interacted with occupants (entanglement, etc...).

Now... they're harder to kill, less expensive, and about where they should be in re: passengers.

I think the points need to increase slightly, but too far in the other direction rules-wise, and we're back to 3rd edition stand-and-shoot or mob-and-assault style armies.

You wanna make mech even stronger!

Wat?

Having seen many vehicle wrecks where a tree went through someone's car (whether being blown through or falling through) or a variety of other objects punctured through the vehicle, I have never seen a car explode. Unless 'promethium' is what they call nitro glycerin in the future, it isn't realistic in the slightest.

Is it balanced? Absolutely. Sorry, the game is very balanced. And in any kind of game, realism has to take a backseat to game mechanics. There are several examples of this that I can think of off the top of my head. This is just one more to add to the list. No offense, it sounds like your friends play armies which favor mechanized units. I don't mean to be cruel or indifferent to their suffering, but this is just poor planning. When selecting mechanized units, you always have to consider that all it takes is one lucky shot to turn 250 points into the most expensive piece of terrain you ever placed.

Jimsolo wrote:Having seen many vehicle wrecks where a tree went through someone's car (whether being blown through or falling through) or a variety of other objects punctured through the vehicle, I have never seen a car explode. Unless 'promethium' is what they call nitro glycerin in the future, it isn't realistic in the slightest.

Few things here:
1: I don't think future vehicles are using gas. Or at the very least, they aren't going to be using low octane gas as we do today.
2: A missile is not a tree. A tree does not explode by itself. Missiles tend to explode when they hit things.
3: Most cars don't have piles of ammo inside of them.

Furthermore, you're basing a "reality" on a game where a tank's battle cannon shell can land on top of somebody, and 17% of the time, not hurt them at all.

Exactly my point. Realism is out the window. Which is a necessary evil in a game.

Its okay now and not so easy when you compare it with the 4th ed.

I can usually make a tank, even a Land Raider, crap out pretty frequntly, blow up? sometimes, I have trouble. But it's a heck of a lot easier than Rogue Trader, where you had to use a targeting matrix to aim, locator dice to determine where the hit occurred, then consult one of six or seven charts to see what happened. Cool, but complex and fiddly.

I personally believe that rolling a single D6 on the damage table does make vehicles feel like they blow up pretty often. It's a single D6 and 5 or 6 gets the desired end result, with varying degrees of kaboom at the end of the day.


Now, with all that being said....No, screw the idea of making it harder to damage transports or any vehicles there's already way too damn many 100% mech armies out there. If anything vehicles need to be nerfed a bit to get rid of them. My summarized opinion on the topic is that the entire vehicle rules section needs to be gutted and redone from the ground up with an eye towards not sucking and being less slowed.

Nerfing vehicles across the board will just further cripple the armies like Tau whose vehicles are expensive and in short supply.

The basic problem is that Rhinos and Chimaeras are too cheap. IG have the added advantage that they can take Leman Russes in squadrons.

Some armies, such as Tyranids and Tau, don't have enough anti-tank weapons to deal with the swarms of vehicles.

Lascannon is the defacto standard for powerful anti-tank weapons.

In the hands of a skilled operator it has a 4/6 * 1/6 *1/6 of blowing up a land raider - that's 1/54
Even for a rhino it's only 1/27

Seems about right.

Feels about right to me. AV14 is maybe a tad on the tough side, but it's supposed to be so I deal with it.

Does it suck when 1 las cannon shot first turn absolutely annihilates your AV12 walker (despite cover)? Yeah, you feel a bit raw after that. Still, it's what it was designed to do, and the odds were in your favor for your vehicle coming out ok or only slightly damaged.

I wish there was a little more middleground between "nothing happens" and "nuclear explosion" on the vehicle damage chart. Something like a damaged engine that would cause the vehicle to move half speed or damaged optics that lower the vehicles' BS for a turn or something. The vehicle damage rules are okay now, but a little complexity like this would be cool.

What I would like to see is an explosion actually killing guys in transports. Say, make it S5 AP4.

Alternately, make it so that you roll 2d6 for the chart, something like this:
2: Chain Reaction. Roll Twice and combine.
3: Destroyed: Explodes
4: Destroyed: Wrecked
5:Stunned
6:Shaken
7: Drive Damaged: Vehicle treats every inch of Movement as 2". Treat Further Results as "Immobilized" results.
8: Immobilized
9: Weapon Destroyed
10: Armour Breached: Reduce the armour on the side hit by 1.
11estroyed: Wrecked
12: Destroyed: Explodes

Edit: Whats with the "It's way to easy, you must be a Tyranid player" part of the poll. Tyranids struggle to bl;ow tanks up, unless you charge with a monstrous creature, in which case it's a case of "Shredded tank falls on everyone within d6""

Well, I think they were talking about the article in the BRB. It explains it as "an incredibly lucky hit,perhaps hitting an important component", which doesn't really seem like a 1 in 6 chance.

I like the tank. It's so much fun when on turn one you kill a Leman Russ with a single (lucky) hit to the front. Or a hit to the side. Way too easy, I feel bad. Maybe I'm just lucky.

40K is a fairly lucky game and you just have to accept that.

Play a different set of rules if you want something with more complexity.

Bookwrack wrote:

Samus_aran115 wrote:What do you think?

If they're all in agreement, I think you're friends are being whiners. It's a 1 in 6 chance of the tank exploding... AFTER its had something successfully blow right through its armor. What's not realistic about it?

I'd say that there's a 5/6 chance that your friends are just whiney.

If you are having problems keeping your tanks alive, maybe you aren't popping smoke at the right time, or are exposing the sides and backs too often, or not hiding behind enough cover. Running all of your tanks and vehicles into the middle of the board isn't smart, unless you are an ork. Then, it's ryte an proppa!