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I've heard some complaints of people around my area hating the all or nothing aspect of cover saves. It's very weird to have 15 out of 30 models in cover and have the whole unit gain a 4+ save, but have only 14 and it completely drops off. As long as you can get half the unit in cover you can have the rest of the guys just sitting out in the open. I believe going to a tiered system that actually encourages putting all of your guys in cover would make a better cover system. Basically what I'm proposing is this:

4+ cover save if 75% or more of the unit is in cover
5+ cover save if 50% or more
6+ cover save if 25% or more

+1 to roll for harder than average cover like fortified walls and buildings
-1 to roll for softer than average cover like wooden fences or barbed wire

While there are still cutoff points, they are much less dramatic. There's also reason to take cover with as many models as you can even if you can't get 50% of the unit into cover. The reduction in cover save for having 50% or more and less than 75% is balanced by the addition of a cover save for only having 25%.

I've always wondered why the cover system got changed at all in this respect. It seems to be a way of nullifying desputes before they occur but it also seems totally unneccessary.

Wounds are allocated before any saves are taken. Logically you would shoot at the guy you have the clearest LOS to. So why aren't wounds simply allocated to the jack-hats who are standing out in the open first while the rest of their squad is hiding behind something? My thought is at least one wound must be allocated to every unit who is not behind cover before any wounds are put on units in cover.

A reason I can think of for the current cover system over what I suggested is for augmenting Tank Killing ability with the TLOS rules. If everyone in my 20-man squad is in cover except my Lascannon then I can pop off a shot at a tank while still getting a cover save when it shoots back. This sacrifices realism for gameplay but it works out for a better game overall IMO.

I think the thing with wound allocations is that the models are meant to actually move ComputerGeek, if someone shot at them they'ed duck on one knee or something. Or if a heavy weapon guy got shot, someone else would pick up the weapon. Unless he was sniped.

They don't do percentile of body coverage anymore, because that took so long when they tried to make 1st ed to 2nd ed, which meant changing it from small skirmish battles, to GW trying to make it platoons, against platoons, which took a looong time and lots of arguments.

So when they got to 3rd edition which was fought with large armies, they got rid of the idea of coverage and instead categorized things together. Such as walls, barricades, ruins being 4+, whereas forests are 5+ and so on.

ComputerGeek01 wrote:I've always wondered why the cover system got changed at all in this respect. It seems to be a way of nullifying desputes before they occur but it also seems totally unneccessary.

Wounds are allocated before any saves are taken. Logically you would shoot at the guy you have the clearest LOS to. So why aren't wounds simply allocated to the jack-hats who are standing out in the open first while the rest of their squad is hiding behind something? My thought is at least one wound must be allocated to every unit who is not behind cover before any wounds are put on units in cover.

It's a really good idea, and one I think provides the best solution to the problem. Unfortunately the defender assigns saves, not the attacker, and the defender will choose to take saves with models in cover before assigning saves to models in cover. We can apply a rule that says that saves must first be assigned to models out of cover, but then we're back to the old problem of LOS sniping (carefully positioning a model so that the only model he can see is the heavy weapons guy, so in 4th ed he would be removed as a casualty).