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I recently posted a forum about the cover saves, and how I believe troops should get armor saves and cover saves if cover fails. I also wish distance was incorporated with every shot from every unit based on their ballistic skill. Missing point blank range, and hitting a tiny grunt halfway across the board is ridiculous. Also missing a scatter dice at point blank by 4 inches gets annoying.
My main concern is I feel units like the Space Marines are underpowered. With one Marine having a strength and skill of a platoon of men, I should be able to wipe out an Ork squad with 3 guys easily. I thought about what would have to be changed in order to make the game more realistic on all levels. While some other game rules would have to be improved in my opinion, like cover saves and distance, (which are my only two big beefs) the main flaw I see are the six sided dice. The game revolves around the six sided dice and you cannot make distinct changes between races with a D6. If GW had D12, or some larger sided dice as standard dice, with maybe smaller different ones for scatter, they could make more significant the skills of each race. To make a comparison, think of a red, blue, yellow wheel, then think of a rainbow. Much more "color." Then from there they could balance the points of each unit. The structure for the game is already there. Just change some numbers around to match the skills of armies from the well written story books. Otherwise, the rules are spot on. My Space Marines don't feel as badass as I would like, or have read in books. Many units, even Orks, seem underpowered. The game concept wouldn't change, just the numbers. I like realism, and its hard to settle when in my opinion, the game could be even better. Change the "to hits" and "to wounds" values etc. Like I said, mostly the numbers of skills, leaderships, etc, might have to be changed. I've played a lot, and while balancing armies is essential, my army doesn't feel unique on the battlefield. They are too much like other armies, and those armies alike. I say, allow for an over skilled army, just cost them more with points on deployment. Each army should have more of its strengths and weaknesses shown. I feel the lines of the races and armies are blurred.

(Making the proper scale size of each unit, especially the tanks to soldier ratio, would be cool, but that may never happen. It would suck, since people would have to buy their units all over again. (Space Marines should stand higher than Imperial Guard, etc.)

Would GW ever consider changing the rules? I know they have changed a helluva lot between these rules and the 2004 ones that came with Battle for Macragge.

I love this game, its one of the coolest things ever made. If GW wants to make a realistic game, which they have now, for me, it could be better. Much better. What do you all think?

Back in second edition days and even before, they did in fact use multiple dice beyond the 6 sided ones. They were mostly used for damage for various weapons and not for your typical to hit roles. The issue that 40k has is that it has an identity crisis between being a skirmish game with very intricate rules and a larger scale game with broad rules. It just doesn't know which it wants to be. Sadly, games workshop from a business standpoint has no motivation at this moment to change that because they do not consider themselves to be a game company anymore. They are a company that makes "collectible" miniatures that happen to have some rules to play with vs the exact opopposite. I feel your pain though and as an avid 40k player I too wish that the rules were more exciting and enjoyable.

timebandit3077 wrote:I should be able to wipe out an Ork squad with 3 guys easily

No, they shouldn't.

If you want three dudes that can handle a pile of boyz, take terminators, and spent terminators kinds of points on them. Or were you proposing that space marines got a lot better with no price increase just because? Play orks for a little while against tac marines and then say that.

timebandit3077 wrote:
and how I believe troops should get armor saves and cover saves if cover fails.

Why? If you fail your cover save, you already failed a save better than what your armor would've been.

If you lways take both, then MEQs just got a big surviveability buff, while lighter armies stay in the exact same place.

Anyway, it sounds like you want to play move marine rules, so go try and dig those up and see if someone will play you with them.

GW never has, and never will make GW a 'realistic game.' It's simply not possible, not at 28 scale, not with the infantry, vehicles, and air craft that they want to include in a game.

Hmm. If the game really shouldn't, or couldn't be changed, are the rules currently in your opinions balanced? Also, if GW is not willing to make any more rules, which I don't see how that is considering they've been making and updating rules for the past decade, who will be able to make the rules?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

akon4643 wrote:
Back in second edition days and even before, they did in fact use multiple dice beyond the 6 sided ones. They were mostly used for damage for various weapons and not for your typical to hit roles. The issue that 40k has is that it has an identity crisis between being a skirmish game with very intricate rules and a larger scale game with broad rules. It just doesn't know which it wants to be. Sadly, games workshop from a business standpoint has no motivation at this moment to change that because they do not consider themselves to be a game company anymore. They are a company that makes "collectible" miniatures that happen to have some rules to play with vs the exact opopposite. I feel your pain though and as an avid 40k player I too wish that the rules were more exciting and enjoyable.

Well, can't it be both? I don't see how GW won't make rules anymore, considering they've been making rules for about a decade.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Bookwrack wrote:

timebandit3077 wrote:
and how I believe troops should get armor saves and cover saves if cover fails.

Why? If you fail your cover save, you already failed a save better than what your armor would've been.

If I'm behind a wall, and I get a 4+ save, that is not better than an armor save of 3+. The cover save is because it is harder to hit units behind cover. Therefore, once they do land a hit and a wound on a unit behind cover, they should not only get the cover save to see if the enemy hit, but also an armor save, if that hit wounded. All units should still get their armor save behind cover, its not like their armor disappears when they enter cover.

Read the lore for other armies. Your Space Marines don't feel as badass as the lore would indicate because you're reading SM-perspective lore that's supposed to exaggerate their awesomeness and get you pumped for that army specifically. The biggest issue here is that the person on the other end of the table with the Orks is, in fact, a real, live person who isn't particularly interested in having practically useless models just to pull off the table for the sole purpose of making you feel like your tiny band of Space Marines is more awesome. This isn't a video game or a movie, where the hero is there to massacre his way through hundreds of faceless mooks, this is a game with two sides, two players, and two heroes.

I have no idea where the persistent myth that larger die sizes would make the game better or fluffier started, but they've got no basis in fact or statistics. Trying to use this as an excuse to make the game 'fluffier' is going to have the issues listed above wherever the numbers are, the dice won't solve any of the fundamental problems with the game structure, and game balance is a property of the rolling update schedule, not the dice.

As to such broad, sweeping changes we're doomed by the grandfather clause on this one. GW can't change any of the fundamental problems because they'd have to toss out their entire business model and rewrite their entire game from scratch.

Yes "fluff-wise" space marines should be bs5 ws5 s5 have 2 wounds with a 12" move, but that really wouldn't be very fun for anyone fighting them. Again, the idea for taking ALL your saves when you have a chance does sound more realistic BUT do you really want to have roll up to 3 times just for one wound? The game isn't designed to work that way. Think about the 2++ rerollable eldar units. Now let them take ALL of their saves with re-rolls. Congrats you just broke the game. Using more types of dice doesn't help here either it just makes it even MORE complicated then it has to be. GW has on occassion made rules that make me question their sanity, but for the most part the ideas behind 40ks rulestructure are solid.

I was using the Marines as an example because its the only race I know. Maybe the books made them more badass then they actually are. Well, I'm the guy who always looks to improve things, but don't fix what truly isn't broken.

timebandit3077 wrote:
I was using the Marines as an example because its the only race I know. Maybe the books made them more badass then they actually are. Well, I'm the guy who always looks to improve things, but don't fix what truly isn't broken.

This is a pattern, we get Marine players complaining that they aren't unstoppable one-man armies like they tend towards in the lore quite frequently.

Your complaint about armour making cover functionally irrelevant is one that's been bandied about as an issue for some time, however; it's not likely to change in the official rules due to the grandfather-claused nature of a lot of the rules (if something hasn't changed since the 2e-3e crossover changing it is a pretty big deal) but other games and fan projects do tend to incorporate it into the to-hit roll.

Interesting. O.k. Well I always wondered why they didn't make the models accurate to the books. It seems so much cooler. Yea the cover thing seems to be the only thing that bugs me. The "to hit" verses distance as well. I hate missing a target 4 inches a way with a scatter dice. I also hate missing a massive Tyranid a foot a way but am able to hit a grunt halfway across the battlefield.

timebandit3077 wrote:
Interesting. O.k. Well I always wondered why they didn't make the models accurate to the books.

Cause than you'd have to make models with tripple profiles.

Profile 1 - one-man armies; capable of tanking krak missiles like no big deal, outwitting and outperforming all the foes and winning in 100 to 1 fights for when you read books about marines fighting other factions
Profile 2 - enchanted super-humans with their goods and bads; capable of landing devastating strikes but at the same time loosing badly having made a serious tactical mistake (and they make mistakes) due to being severely outnumbered more often than not if you read books not about marines or fighting against marines but that remotedly touch them
Profile 3 - mentally slowed bullies without a single idea of what tactics is; capable only of running forward with chainswords screaming: "For the EMPORAA" falling into your cunning traps and dying en masse if you read books about other factions fighting marines

This thread hits on several ideas that I've seen come up in the Proposed Rules corner of the forums a lot lately, and I thought I'd take this opportunity to share my own thoughts on some of them.

Marines Aren't Badass Enough: So I'm going to preface this by saying that I rarely use my marines. My marines are basically all gifts, and I'm a space elf fan boy at heart. Now that said, I actually really like the idea of marines being significantly more powerful (and costly in terms of points) than they currently are. I rarely feel like marines match the cool factor they have in books, games, etc., and I consider that a shame even as the guy who's trying to kill them. Killing a bunch of generic power armor mooks is alright. Killing an army of mini-bosses would feel awesome and make marines even more distinctive from other armies as far as play style.

Movie marine rules actually look like a lot of fun, but I suspect they don't hold up well in higher points games because of the sheer numbe of units they'd have to deal with (they're designed for roughly 1,000 point games iirc). I'd love to see rules for playing with, say, half as many marines as you generally see now, but make each marine (or at least each character) significantly more impressive in his own right. As a xenos player, I understand that we all have our own special snowflakes that we want to feel cool and elite, and those units should still be useful against marines, but being THE scary badasses of the galaxy is kind of the marines' thing. I wouldn't mind seeing rules to support it. Now that said, getting cover saves on top of armor saves probably isn't the best way to do that.

Cover Saves on Armor Saves: So there are a few issues with this, and I think they've been pretty well covered already. Nonetheless, here are my two pennies. You're adding yet another set of rolls to the attack-resolution-flowchart which means the game becomes significantly slower (and it's already slow most of the time). You're also giving heavily armored units a pretty big advantage while essentially giving stealth-dependent/lightly-armored units nothing. This would cause a widening in power level between various units that would call for a recalculation of the points of all units in the game to account for it.

One interesting variation that, if I remember right, used to exist was to treat cover as a to-hit modifier and use it sparingly. So light-to-no cover would have no effect. Thickish cover would be a -1, and dedicated cover like bunkers would be -2 or something. Presumably with 6s always managing to hit regardless of cover.

Range Affecting Ability to Hit: This would slow the game down a bit more as you'd have to be more careful with how far away a unit is, remember an additional weapon profile, and resolve squads with some martials in range of one profile with some models but only in range for a different profile with the other models. And while it's not perfect, some rules already exist to help reflect superior accuracy over various distances. Rapid fire, for instance, basically reflects being able to fire more quickly (aiming less) because the enemy is closer and easier to hit. Sure, missing with the missile launcher at close range is annoying, but it's far from impossible. Think of all the times you missed that guy at close range while playing Halo.

different die Sizes: So from what I understand, Anomander Rake, the desire to have a larger die size and/or a wider range of dice sizes has less to do with "balance," and more to do with mechanically representing differences in ability more accurately. So for instance, an ork is just as strong as a human and (if I'm not mistaken) even a tau fire warrior when he's not charging. Using (for instance) a d10 system, you might have the Tau at Strength 3, the guardsman at Strength 4, and the ork at Strength 5 or even 6. Right now, an IG vet is just as good at sharp shooting as an adeptus astartes.

I totally see where the desire for a broader range of die sizes comes from, but I don't actually like the idea of using them if the attack resolution process remains as it is. Having a bajillion d10s (or whatever size of dice) to roll simply isn't as easy for my eye to resolve as d6s are. The pips on d6s are easy to read, and my brain can quickly scan a pile of dice to figure out what to pay attention to. With d10s, pips would be visually confusing, and numerals would be a bit harder to sift through as well.

Also, I don't mind the lack of variation in statlines too much because, aside from special characters and such, those statlines are being used to abstractly represent an event. If this were an arena game or something where the camera is zoomed in on fewer models, I'd be all for more statline variation, but the a wrack being toughness 4 while a wych is toughness 3 suffices on the more abstract level that the game generally plays.


SUMMARY:
It sounds like your real goal is to simply make marines feel more badass on the table. I'm all for that, but it would probably be handled better by redesigning their codex/stats from the groundup rather than trying to pull it off by modifying non-marine-specific rules that will have dramatic consequences for units in other factions across the board.

I disgree with the cover + armor saves; I feel that it currently favors lightly armored units being parked in ruins over heavily armored units doing the same smart thing and staying in cover as well.

You could go so far as to say that the units in the game that pay for armor saves i.e Marines and Terminators pay too much for a save that can be attained through the same positioning THEY SHOULD BE DOING ANYWAY. It's one more dice roll, it adds MAYBE 10 min total.