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Well, yeah, translating it directly over wouldn't work, but you can still translate the idea of it over, by designating each weapon as being good at dealing with infantry, monsters or vehicles, or a combination of the three.

The strange thing about 8th ed is that for a system that is supposed to rely on keywords, it doesn't make that much use of them.
Like, sure, there are some weapons that specify having an effect on certain keyword types, but why not ALL weapons? That should differentiate them, and solve the AT weapon problem.

Yes I get your point. Historically armed vehicles have a tendency to be alive or dead. They degrade a bit but often what can seriously degrade them just knocks them out instead.

In the fluff a round from a battlecannon or lascannon can knock out your vehicle. Game wise, its nowhere near that. 'Realistically' if a BMP (Chimera) is hit by an MBTs main cannon it is gone. Here it takes a few turns of degrading it.

I think though this was the only way to give them survive-ability so they can tank around the tabletop. But it means when you encounter stuff that for balance reasons can just kill them (some marine stuff for example) it feels so odd compared to classic AT weapons like lascannon not being able to.

 Insectum7 wrote:

Pointed Stick wrote:

Gone are the days of a single lascannon looking dangerous; instead, destroying vehicles feels more like peeling the layers of an onion than trying to line up the perfect killshot. I guess I'm an old fogey here, but I kind of liked the days of 3rd and 4th edition where heavy anti-tank weapons were expensive and rare, but each hit had a decent chance of wrecking a vehicle.

Does anyone else feel similarly?

Yup. Those old mechanics helped balance the game more in favor towards infantry, as that single heavy weapon in a squad could one-shot a tank. AV 14 was still pretty tough, but a lot of the time you could flank those and put a Lascannon into the side of a Leman Russ and have roughly a 25% chance of a kill via Lascannon. I felt the damage mechanics were nice too. Immobilizing things or just stopping them from shooting for a turn.

No it wasn't. There was a reason no one had seen a land raider since 5th, because they popped like balloons. Front/back/side, didn't matter(yes I know they were 14 all around but it was the same with russes). You'd be lucky if they lasted one MODEL of shooting, let alone a whole turn.

The damage mechanics just added insult to injury. There's a reason that by the end of seventh the only vehicles seeing any consistent play were either Free, Knights, or drop pods.

I just don't understand why tanks and the like have a 3+ save. A 2+ would make them highly resistant to anti-infantry weapons but still vulnerable to anti-tank, as they should be. As it stands, a 3+ save makes high-S, high-damage, high-AP, single shot weapons typically less effective than cheap high-volume ones with AP-1.

I'd rather they gave heavier vehicles a 2+ save and dialed back the number of wounds they have. A Leman Russ with a 2+ and 10 wounds would sweat a little more about lascannons that could bracket it in one shot, but wouldn't have to worry about massed bolter fire.

All these problems can be solved over night with one fix.

Move all die and stats to d12. Done. Now I don't care how many S3 shots you shoot at my T10 Rhino, if my toughness is 3x your strength, you cannot damage my vehicle. And vice versa, if you S = 3(T), you automatically do max damage. Thus, A Warlord titan has NO CHANCE of not obliterating your squad of Guardsmen with it's Sunfury Plasma Annihilator. I don't care what you roll, that squad is no longer there.

I like the idea of upping stats and getting rid of invuln saves to make tanks and anti-tank weapons both more appealing. For me though the thing that kills tanks is the ability to shut them down by locking them in combat. That might be the most immersion breaking rule in the game for me. Especially when it's like a land raider surrounded by gants. Why can't the raider just drive over them or at least be shooting it's weapons while it waits for it's slow death by nibbles.

Except the design brief for 8th (we know this from stream interviews) was “everything has at least some chance of damaging everything”, so this wouldn’t fit with their objectives for the edition.

You don't need to throw out "everything has at least some chance of damaging everything" to fix the problem. If vehicles had more wounds, a better save, and few/no invulns and FNP saves, you could still shoot a Knight to death with flashlights, and it would still take so long as to be pointless in all practicality as it is today.

 Ginjitzu wrote:
The problem with

trying to line up the perfect killshot

is that while awesome sounding in a narrative sense, I really don't think there's any mechanic that can satisfactorily represent this in a dice game. In a game that essentially consists of I move my blob of models; I shoot your blob of models; you move your blob of models; you shoot my blob of models, I actually think that

peeling the layers of an onion

is the better option. No matter how expensive you make a trooper with a lascannon in terms of points, the tank is always going to cost more money, and removing that expensive tank from the table in the first couple of turns is going to hurt a lot more than removing the trooper.

You can make that infantry lascannon model expensive enough because this isn’t just a dice game or a points game, it’s a game of moving the models around, and position is the kind of expense you can use.

By itself a basic lascannon trooper can start out doing a bad job against tanks. But if it didn’t move that turn, if it’s under half range, if it didn’t get shot at at all the last shooting phase, and even if it has a view of the back of a tank, any sliver at all, then it can start piling on bonuses to wound rolls and damage for each one of those. Getting any of those in combination is pretty difficult, and that’s what makes the model expensive in terms of how good you have to be at the game.

Any amount of getting rid of special rules (invulnerable saves etc) and just using the basic profile characteristics from the main rule book is better, and then just fill in the profile using numbers from the data sheet and board position

 FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
All these problems can be solved over night with one fix.

Move all die and stats to d12. Done. Now I don't care how many S3 shots you shoot at my T10 Rhino, if my toughness is 3x your strength, you cannot damage my vehicle. And vice versa, if you S = 3(T), you automatically do max damage. Thus, A Warlord titan has NO CHANCE of not obliterating your squad of Guardsmen with it's Sunfury Plasma Annihilator. I don't care what you roll, that squad is no longer there.

So now I have to go out and buy 50 d12s and read them all at a glance? Feth that. And don't give that whole 'oh you'd need less dice durkadur' thing because 50 is AFTER needing less dice.

 JohnnyHell wrote:
Except the design brief for 8th (we know this from stream interviews) was “everything has at least some chance of damaging everything”, so this wouldn’t fit with their objectives for the edition.

And its a terrible objective. There is no difference between a lasgun wounding T6, T7 and T8+. The only real form of damage mitigation in that respect are saves.
What they could have done was bring back 7+ rolls. Like, if you need a 7+, you roll a 6+ and then you roll a 4+. That would have added more distinction and made toughness worth something.

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:

 JohnnyHell wrote:
Except the design brief for 8th (we know this from stream interviews) was “everything has at least some chance of damaging everything”, so this wouldn’t fit with their objectives for the edition.

And its a terrible objective. There is no difference between a lasgun wounding T6, T7 and T8+. The only real form of damage mitigation in that respect are saves.
What they could have done was bring back 7+ rolls. Like, if you need a 7+, you roll a 6+ and then you roll a 4+. That would have added more distinction and made toughness worth something.

+1 to saves against weapons that only wound on a 6?

 FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
All these problems can be solved over night with one fix.

Move all die and stats to d12. Done. Now I don't care how many S3 shots you shoot at my T10 Rhino, if my toughness is 3x your strength, you cannot damage my vehicle. And vice versa, if you S = 3(T), you automatically do max damage. Thus, A Warlord titan has NO CHANCE of not obliterating your squad of Guardsmen with it's Sunfury Plasma Annihilator. I don't care what you roll, that squad is no longer there.

After playing the new Apocalypse at approximately 2000 points per side (a fairly standard-sized 40k game these days), I'm sold on a mix of D6 and D12 for different types of actions/rolls. I'm also sold on anti-tank weapons working much better against tanks, anti-personnel weapons working much better against personnel, no AP modifiers, no invulnerable saves, no first-turn alpha strikes, alternating activations, less down time, less dice needed, less CP and stratagem combo shenanigans, more strategy when choosing which units to activate and when, and actual damage unknown and not determined until after both sides have completed all of their actions. The new Apocalpyse rules do away with the vast majority of issues I have with 40k and I honestly wish they would become the major basis for a new 9th edition.

ERJAK wrote:

 FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:
All these problems can be solved over night with one fix.

Move all die and stats to d12. Done. Now I don't care how many S3 shots you shoot at my T10 Rhino, if my toughness is 3x your strength, you cannot damage my vehicle. And vice versa, if you S = 3(T), you automatically do max damage. Thus, A Warlord titan has NO CHANCE of not obliterating your squad of Guardsmen with it's Sunfury Plasma Annihilator. I don't care what you roll, that squad is no longer there.

So now I have to go out and buy 50 d12s and read them all at a glance? Feth that. And don't give that whole 'oh you'd need less dice durkadur' thing because 50 is AFTER needing less dice.

Really the only thing that needs to go to D12 is saving throws to allow AP to be worth a damn and allow invulnerable saves etc to be turned into + modifiers and such.

Atleast that way you can make failing armour saves in enough quantity to count be less of a thing and mean you really do need to pile on the AP to hunt big game instead of the current mess.

Like land raider etc with a 2 or 3+ on a D12 russes on a 4 or 5, invlunerable saves being +1, 2 or 3 to your save and such and your needing to go melta or lascannons to even have a realistic chance of failure.
Marines on 6-7 4+ becoming 8-9, 5+ 10, 11 6+ saves become 11-12

 Daedalus81 wrote:

 CthuluIsSpy wrote:

 JohnnyHell wrote:
Except the design brief for 8th (we know this from stream interviews) was “everything has at least some chance of damaging everything”, so this wouldn’t fit with their objectives for the edition.

And its a terrible objective. There is no difference between a lasgun wounding T6, T7 and T8+. The only real form of damage mitigation in that respect are saves.
What they could have done was bring back 7+ rolls. Like, if you need a 7+, you roll a 6+ and then you roll a 4+. That would have added more distinction and made toughness worth something.

+1 to saves against weapons that only wound on a 6?

Yeah, that might work. Like, if the weapon strength is less half of target toughness, the target gets a bonus to saves which scales by how weak the weapon is.
So S3 against T6 = no bonus
S3 against T7 = +1
S3 against T8 = +2

and so on.

The new rules on vehicles themselves are mostly fine and a huge improvement over past versions. The main issue is that a lot of the AT weapons are incredibly random and downright terrible against anything else. It creates a situation where in many games AT weapons do nothing and don't feel worth taking, but on the flip side, vehicles themselves have a high enough chance of getting trivially removed that they're too risky to take. The end result is just as you say. Vehicles can often feel too hard to kill while also feeling like they die too easily to feel like you can rely on them pulling their weight.

I like the idea that Infantry weapons are D6 rolls, and Anti-tank rolls are D12. You need at LEAST a D7 to have a chance of wounding a vehicle, so unless you have +1 to wound, it would be impossible for your bolter to wound a tank.

Any it would make it flat out impossible for a flashlight to wound something like a Titan or a lord of war.

Instead of adding extra rules, buffs/debuffs, and other changes IMHO changing the shooting phase to "I pick a unit to shoot, then you pick a unit to shoot" would go a long way for balancing the game (granted, this is ignoring the issue of Knights)


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Taking turns in the shooting phase (like in the fight phase) would help prevent vehicles from being shot off before they get a chance to do anything.

Jimbobbyish wrote:
Instead of adding extra rules, buffs/debuffs, and other changes IMHO changing the shooting phase to "I pick a unit to shoot, then you pick a unit to shoot" would go a long way for balancing the game (granted, this is ignoring the issue of Knights)


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Taking turns in the shooting phase (like in the fight phase) would help prevent vehicles from being shot off before they get a chance to do anything.

Only consistently if damage is calculated and applied at a later phase. Hence, my post above about the new Apocalypse ruleset.

 Gnarlly wrote:

Jimbobbyish wrote:
Instead of adding extra rules, buffs/debuffs, and other changes IMHO changing the shooting phase to "I pick a unit to shoot, then you pick a unit to shoot" would go a long way for balancing the game (granted, this is ignoring the issue of Knights)


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Taking turns in the shooting phase (like in the fight phase) would help prevent vehicles from being shot off before they get a chance to do anything.

Only consistently if damage is calculated and applied at a later phase. Hence, my post above about the new Apocalypse ruleset.

My bad, missed it.

ERJAK wrote:

 Insectum7 wrote:

Pointed Stick wrote:

Gone are the days of a single lascannon looking dangerous; instead, destroying vehicles feels more like peeling the layers of an onion than trying to line up the perfect killshot. I guess I'm an old fogey here, but I kind of liked the days of 3rd and 4th edition where heavy anti-tank weapons were expensive and rare, but each hit had a decent chance of wrecking a vehicle.

Does anyone else feel similarly?

Yup. Those old mechanics helped balance the game more in favor towards infantry, as that single heavy weapon in a squad could one-shot a tank. AV 14 was still pretty tough, but a lot of the time you could flank those and put a Lascannon into the side of a Leman Russ and have roughly a 25% chance of a kill via Lascannon. I felt the damage mechanics were nice too. Immobilizing things or just stopping them from shooting for a turn.

No it wasn't. There was a reason no one had seen a land raider since 5th, because they popped like balloons. Front/back/side, didn't matter(yes I know they were 14 all around but it was the same with russes). You'd be lucky if they lasted one MODEL of shooting, let alone a whole turn.

The damage mechanics just added insult to injury. There's a reason that by the end of seventh the only vehicles seeing any consistent play were either Free, Knights, or drop pods.

Two things.

1. In 5th edition GW reintroduced TLOS, removing much of the cover that vehicles could traditionally obscure themselves with.
2. In 5th the amount of special and heavy weapons available to armies began exploding.
More guns with less to hide behind, what do you think the result was going to be?

Also of interesting:
The shift from 2nd Ed to 3rd saw the prices of infantry drop, while the Land Raider went up in price. In 2nd Edition, a Marine Squad with a Missile Launcher and Flamer was 359 points, while a Land Raider with Lascannons and Heavy Bolters costed 220. In 3rd, the positions of expense were dramatically reversed, 165 (?) for the Marines, 250 for the Raider. In 2nd, even though a single shot might take out a tank, it didn't weigh as heavily in terms of points compared to other units.

People who complain about 300 lasguns being able to kill a tank and wishing for old rules should remember that a squad of Space Marines could reliably punch tanks to Death with their combat knifes, the tanks getting no save against that at all. Or a lascannon taking out a tank but only taking one wound of a Chaos Lord of Nurgle (only If he failed his 4++ and 5+++ of course, after being wounded on a 2+ while vehicles would be the only units to be wounded automatically).

The system right now is okay. I'd like if they did more than just lump anything in T7 or T8 (with Xenos having sometimes less), but somehow only FW units are allowed to go higher. Higher T or more wounds for some vehicles might be okay, though I couldn't say which vehicle I'd consider too squishy these days. Dreadnoughts maybe, but that's just because I'm Death Guard, overall they're cheap enough to die fast.

Sgt. Cortez wrote:
People who complain about 300 lasguns being able to kill a tank and wishing for old rules should remember that a squad of Space Marines could reliably punch tanks to Death with their combat knifes, the tanks getting no save against that at all. Or a lascannon taking out a tank but only taking one wound of a Chaos Lord of Nurgle (only If he failed his 4++ and 5+++ of course, after being wounded on a 2+ while vehicles would be the only units to be wounded automatically).

Oh I haven't forgotten about these things. They always felt ridiculous, and we complained about them. If I recall, Eldar Wraithlords and Necron C'Tan were the bane of my Orks back in 3rd edition due to being multi-wound models with a super-high Toughness of 8, which was a *big* deal back then.

Again, in general the change to use the same ruleset for tanks, monsters, and infantry has been a big win overall in my opinion. I just think it needs tweaking to make tanks feel tanky again.

 Mr Morden wrote:

 Tyranid Horde wrote:
I think if they were able to bring back the damage chart for vehicles it would make them far more interesting. Shaking and stunning a tank was a valid tactic to neuter a tank for a turn while you had other things to do.

It was also thematic as hell, an immobilised tank in the middle of a densely packed board, weapons getting destroyed as it gets whittled down, that was cool. Now tanks are just lifted from the table and don't become terrain if they get destroyed.

I like it as is.

The biggest problem was that the old system was that it did not apply to monsters like Tyranids, Wratih knights or most annoyingly fake ones like Riptides. Havinig the same system apply - you can just as easily blow weapon limbs or legs of a monster as damage tracks etc on a vehicle - may have helped 6th/7th a huge amount.

The old system work as long as the MC's had implicit limits, usually 3-4 wounds (sometimes 5) - sure it was somewhat illogical that a Lascannon could not one-shot a Carnifex, but the MC's were so vulnerable to number of other threats that it was not imbalacing as such. Problems began when Codex designers began to add units with 6 or more wounds, often with Inv saves - it broke the balance down. Why would anyone add a Hammerhead on their army when Riptide is so much tougher?

8th system is a bore. Vehicles are now generic abstracted piles of hp and once the hit points are expended, they disappear magically. Yawn. The system no longer feels like it is simulating a battle, it feels like a game.

^Oh yeah, the fact that wrecks dont stick around anymore bugs me too.

 Insectum7 wrote:
^Oh yeah, the fact that wrecks dont stick around anymore bugs me too.

granted that's easily house ruled. I do think it's something that should be put into the rules as a "optional rule" without making it REQUIRED, as some minis honestly aren't ones I'd wanna leave sitting on the table as just scenery

 Insectum7 wrote:
^Oh yeah, the fact that wrecks dont stick around anymore bugs me too.

One often overlooked feature of that is that knocked out vehicles became terrain that could give cover or disrupt movement/charges. Had quite a few games in 7th where destroyed vehicles played a major part in unit movement and allowed infantry to have some added protection in certain parts of the board. It's something that makes the game feel tactical and the board matters instead of just being a exercise in theory craft number crunching.

 Gnarlly wrote:

Jimbobbyish wrote:
Instead of adding extra rules, buffs/debuffs, and other changes IMHO changing the shooting phase to "I pick a unit to shoot, then you pick a unit to shoot" would go a long way for balancing the game (granted, this is ignoring the issue of Knights)


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Taking turns in the shooting phase (like in the fight phase) would help prevent vehicles from being shot off before they get a chance to do anything.

Only consistently if damage is calculated and applied at a later phase. Hence, my post above about the new Apocalypse ruleset.

This would be absolutely great.

Well, actually I’d want vehicles to not be able to do this and only infantry to get it but nvm

Ice_can wrote:

 Mmmpi wrote:
I'm in favor of reducing wounds but giving a semi-reliable FNP to all of them (say 5+ for lighter vehicles, and 4+ for heavy). So a Chimera or rhino chassis might have W:5 and FNP: 5+, while a Leman Russ would have W:6 and FNP: 4+. It means a las cannon "could" kill one in a single shot, but not reliably, but at the same time, they can be overwhelmed by small attacks.

That's really the opposite of how you kill armoured vehicles in reality. Shoot an Abrams Markava or Challanger with a 7.62 mangine gun for 1 hour and see if it still drives and shoots.

You take them down with anti armour not just massed flashlights, the old AV vrs S I get why people didn't like it when people suddenly brough full mech lists but this everything wounds everything and invulnerable saves FNP etc has turned it into how many dice can i throw for fewest points.

They would still have high toughness, which means fewer of those hits would go through.

 Mmmpi wrote:

Ice_can wrote:

 Mmmpi wrote:
I'm in favor of reducing wounds but giving a semi-reliable FNP to all of them (say 5+ for lighter vehicles, and 4+ for heavy). So a Chimera or rhino chassis might have W:5 and FNP: 5+, while a Leman Russ would have W:6 and FNP: 4+. It means a las cannon "could" kill one in a single shot, but not reliably, but at the same time, they can be overwhelmed by small attacks.

That's really the opposite of how you kill armoured vehicles in reality. Shoot an Abrams Markava or Challanger with a 7.62 mangine gun for 1 hour and see if it still drives and shoots.

You take them down with anti armour not just massed flashlights, the old AV vrs S I get why people didn't like it when people suddenly brough full mech lists but this everything wounds everything and invulnerable saves FNP etc has turned it into how many dice can i throw for fewest points.

They would still have high toughness, which means fewer of those hits would go through.

Not really. Mathematically speaking T6 and T8 are the same against S3.
Which is a problem, really.
T8 is certainly high tougness, but T6? That's a light vehicle.