Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

Just want to know in your humble opinions....
Does the old vehicle creation template thing you can find on the web (makes you a datafax, y' know...) come up with realistic points values and usable in battle vehicles? I suspect we'd see more kustom tank madness etc if a) people tried to make less 'steamroller with twenty lascannons' vehicles and b) if GW stores (and tourney nuts) were less uptight about canonical accuracy.

Has anyone lese built up their own vehicles or variants, and if so, how did they go? Did you use the online vehicle creation dealy?

It's a little out-dated, but should still work. There may be one or two rules issues with things that have been updated elsewhere... Haven't looked at it in a while.


While it's possible to make some pretty abusive stuff with it, for the most part the VDR tended to over-cost everything. The idea was that it was intended for people to create interesting and fun additions to their armies, rather than allow you to create uber-competitive Death Machines of Doom.

So you can create Death Machines of Doom, but they'll generally be less than economical points-wise.

The VDR created very wonky points values. If you recreated the codex vehicles some were about the same and some were very different.

The problem was that it takes no account of the value of the vehicle. Adding a point of armour to a vehicle with a 10pt gun and no transport capacity should be much cheaper than adding a point of armour to a vehicle that transports 20 and has 200 points of guns on it.

Myself and a friend created a system for 3rd edition that worked better. You bought weapons, paying a set percentage extra on each subsequent one (so no tanks with 100 bolters) then applied a percentage modifier based on the arc of fire of the weapon. You also bought transport capacity which was then modified by the number and position of firepoints and access points. Speed and armour where then multipliers of the payload cost. After extesive tuning it would recreate all the codex vehicles with values within 10%.

The math was pretty heavy though and when 4th came out we couldn't face revising it!

the best thing to do if you want to create your own tanks is to base it off of existing vehicles.


Example: i made a "Mechanicus Rhino" for my Mechanicus Codex. we started with a rhino(without a Stormbolter) and added 4 Servo arms and the ability to repair vehicles and make 4 Str8 power weapon attacks in cc at an assumed WS of 3.

i costed 4 Servo arms at 20 pts.

Vehicle Repair at 30 pts

and fighting at 10 pts.

Sub cost: 85 pts. a little expensive for an AV11 tank without a ranged weapon so i dropped it by 5 pts.

final cost was 80 pts.

if i had done the same thing on a LR then the cost would have been totally different. Servos would likely have been 50 pts and repair also 50 pts.



it is better to Overcost something then under cost it.

Ahh, nostalgia with the old VDR's.

I remember a creation - a 6" wide rolling wall with 100 front facing bolters, cost around 200pts.

Awesome.

^ This is precisely why people don't like the VDR.

What's the point of using the VDR to 'recreate' already existing vehicles? You'd just use the existing vehicles wouldn't you?

I resurrected the old eldar 'Warp Hunter' tank for my eldar using it. Essentially a Fire Prism that swaps the prism cannon for a long-barrelled D-Cannon (to make it a mobile d-cannon).

It didn't unbalance the game. I only had the one model, anyway (built it in 2nd ed).

I must be getting old if people are applying 'nostalgia' to something around 10 years old.

chromedog wrote:What's the point of using the VDR to 'recreate' already existing vehicles? You'd just use the existing vehicles wouldn't you?

Quite right, that's not the point of the VDR. It is a decent test to see if produces sensible points values though. It didn't back then and it's even further off now.

The VDR was never intended to remake existing vehicles; in general it was intended to cost things high. It wasn't perfect. The higher cost was to reflect the unusualness of the vehicle rather than to produce a point cost that directly reflected vehicle capabilities.

The purpose of the rules was to allow people to have fun, not for people to find work arounds to get newer and better versions of existing vehicles.

The simple fact is GW's game designers don't care as much about balance as the average player; they care, just not as much. If you were using VDR it was all about fun anyways, and was just a consistent way of scoring these unique creations relative to each other.

I think it would be an interesting project to create a new VDR rule set that was brought in line to the new edition and the power creep thats occured. I guess it could be as simple as saying, based on different established point ranges, subtract X-points. So if your vehicle added upto 150 points under the old system it ends up at 130 points. A more thorough revisit might use more fractional point costs to achieve a better consistency. Maybe instead of making armor cumulative make it multiplicative; to deal with the inherent advantages of lascannon on a landraider as opposed to a rhino.

aka_mythos wrote:The VDR was never intended to remake existing vehicles; in general it was intended to cost things high. It wasn't perfect. The higher cost was to reflect the unusualness of the vehicle rather than to produce a point cost that directly reflected vehicle capabilities.

Which would be fine except it would also cost some things way too low. High armour values on vehicles with lots of weapons, for example. Since armour costs didn't scale with total vehicle cost it would be overcosted for cheap vehicles and undercosted for expensive ones.

The point was it was more "just for fun," that if the precision of point costs were a issue the rules weren't designed for your type of gaming. Its for the type of gaming Apocalypse takes advantage of, where its a less consequencial flavor of fun. One other thing is the demands people have of the VDR system are unrealistic given how much even codex values for vehicles are "off" from what their fair cost should be. I'm pretty sure I remember doing a Land Raider and having the VDR Land Raider come to 260+. Either way its one reason in the post you're quoting I proposed that if the system were ever revisited it would be better if armor was multiplicative rather than cumulative.

Example: if a vehicle has 14 armor on any side, weapon prices are 1.8 times as expensive; while if it has armor of 10, its .8 times the price of the weapon or 20% cheaper. But this could be made even more accurate by creating a scale that takes all sides into consideration. Assuming rear is never higher than sides there are 22 distinct numerical combinations, thats small enough to create a more precise scale of how the armor should increase the relative value of weapons.

Absolutely, this is a far better system. Everything should be factored on the value of the weapons/transport capacity.

Without doing so it's impossible to make fairly priced small or large vehicles.

Playing around on an excel spread sheet I found its pretty easy to construct a numerical model that uses the current value of vehicles to add up to a good interpolation of the appropriate prices for VDR.

op, do the stats the "datafax" makes up for you make sense with the current rules?

the reason i ask is that the "datafax" format was used in 2nd edition mainly which is NOT compatible with the current rules. the VDR rules everyone is talking about above were published in 3rd which is compatible with the current rules.

edit: oh, and the VDR was really strange and to be used in fun games in the end (initially, it was declared by gw as 100% legal but then they retracted that and revised the rules). the lowly ork trukk could be half price in points if you just made it with the VDR and armor 9 or a 10pt discount if you remade it exactly from the codex. after a game or two of that, our old group restricted it to preplanned events where you had to bring in a decidedly non-standard model to use it (i used it for a TMNT terrordrome counts as stompa since they didn't have rules for them back then).

warboss wrote:op, do the stats the "datafax" makes up for you make sense with the current rules?

the reason i ask is that the "datafax" format was used in 2nd edition mainly which is NOT compatible with the current rules. the VDR rules everyone is talking about above were published in 3rd which is compatible with the current rules.

The online VDR generator is nothing to do with 2nd edition.

Indeed, 3rd ed still had datafax for the vehicles, and that is what the output of the Vdr was for.

chromedog wrote:Indeed, 3rd ed still had datafax for the vehicles, and that is what the output of the Vdr was for.

To clarify that a little, the VDR (released in 3rd edition) used datafaxes for the vehicles created. Regular codex vehicles did not have a datafax as they did in 2nd edition.

insaniak wrote:

chromedog wrote:Indeed, 3rd ed still had datafax for the vehicles, and that is what the output of the Vdr was for.

To clarify that a little, the VDR (released in 3rd edition) used datafaxes for the vehicles created. Regular codex vehicles did not have a datafax as they did in 2nd edition.

interesting... i don't remember the datafax format for the vdr. i'll have to take a look at my old white dwarf mags in the basement.

Well, that spurred a lively debate! I ran through the designer mainly because of a very strange and unorthodox tank I've built - basically a rhino chassis as the 'legs' of a humanoid daemon engine (think soul grinder). Its ccw is a giant animal skull, repped on the model by the jawbones and teeth of actual fish and rodents. IMO it looks like something khorne would be into....

Anyhow, it's a fluff vehicle through and through, made to beef up the daemons half of my Grand Alliance of Blood. Here's the finished stats...

CLOSE COMBAT VEHICLE DATAFAX
Name Helljaw
Points 158
WS 4
BS 4
S 5
Front 13
Side 12
Rear 10
I 4
A 3

Type:
Tank

Size:
Normal

Speed:
Normal

Weapons:
2 x Twin-Linked Heavy flamer
1 x Twin-Linked Heavy Bolter
2 x Close combat weapon

Special Options:
Daemon, Fury of Khorne, Insane (in the manner of a chaos dread), We Are Legion
Vehicle Category:
Heavy Support

The Helljaw is a daemonic construct of the Soul Forge, combining scrap metal from bloody battlefields with sinew, bone and gristle. Its most notable feature is the immense skull of a carnivorous beast, stripped of flesh and bolted to giant mechanical servo-motors. The spirit of a raging daemon inhabits the shell of the Helljaw, driving it onwards to acts of bestial carnage, scourging the foe with flame and bolt-fire. As the machine prepares for battle its skeletal face hinges open, and the lower mandible splits into two tooth-studded blades. Cannons on jointed arms creak forth from the recesses of the skull, dripping with promethium fire. But it is in close combat that the madness of the Helljaw is given full rein, as the great jaws of bone and steel snap shut again and again, shearing enemies in two with savage ease.

Anyhow, my comparison of points to usefulness was based on the soul grinder itself (which is pretty good...) - I added the insanity rule for extra flavour and to mitigate the advantages of We Are Legion / Fury of Khorne

aka_mythos wrote:Playing around on an excel spread sheet I found its pretty easy to construct a numerical model that uses the current value of vehicles to add up to a good interpolation of the appropriate prices for VDR.

Would you care to share? That sounds pretty interesting

Yah, whats the site????

It's not a site, it's an excel spreadsheet he made.

Memorandum

R.e: Excel spreadsheet.

Gimme!


That is all.

You can also go to this site for an online version.

http://www.ageofstrife.com/tools/vdr/

There is also a link to download the offline version.
(right hand side)

I need to do a good deal more work to make it worth while.

Look what I made with the online one:

Name: Points/ Front Armour/ Side Armour/ Rear Armour/ BS
Victory Class Predator/ 231/ 13/ 12/ 10/ 4

Type: Tank

Size: Normal

Speed: Normal

Weapons:
2 x Lascannon + co-axial Plasma cannon
Vehicle Category: Heavy Support/Transport 1

Structure Points: -
It can hold 1 HQ unit.