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Before the age of suckmore, before gargantuan creatures roamed the multiverse there was a time when hull points didn't exist and vehicles ruled the earth. GW in its omnipotence stepped in and reigned in the chaos. Flash forward to present day 40k. The game is much more lethal now and extremely hostile to vehicles especially the non jinking variety, and in particular open topped transports which is my focus today.

Lets take a look:
On the plus side open topped transports receive the benefit of 'Assault Vehicle' rules.
On the downside they are susceptible to 'No Escape' from template weapons; suffer +1 on the vehicle damage chart thus increasing the chances of explodes, and embarked units suffer the same damage as closed topped transports. This unfortunately doesn't effect all armies equally. Marine equivalents don't care much regardless of what the strength is. But toughness 3 units and/or 5+ or worse save units get destroyed along with their transport. This has led me to evaluate what could be done to balance out open topped transports.

I may well end up proposing a change to my local group for open topped rides but first I would like to open the topic up for some discussion. Take it away..

I kind of agree with this idea. I don't really have a problem with the open topped vehicles blowing up easier, but it is kind of a gyp that the passengers get the same damage as a closed vehicle. The "ease of exit" should count for something. Make the damage lower strength, or easier to save. I hate to see a truck load of boys go up all at one time due to exploding transport.

Open topped is so much better than closed it's crazy.

Open Topped transports are amazing for several reasons. You can disembark from any point on the hull and ALL units inside can fire from ANY point on the hull.

So, as unrealistic as it may be, you can get 20 lootas to fire from the Grill of a battlewagon, all you have to do to draw line of sight is poke that AV14 front out from behind a LOS blocking cover and fire away.

But imagine a melta gun getting a penetrating hit on an open topped transport, the thing explodes on a 4+. 50% chance of it hurting the passengers inside.

So while it is much easier to wreck these vehicles, I think the benefits of open-topped actually outweigh the negatives.

If my BA could saw the tops off my Rhinos, I would.

If my Tau could saw the tops off my Devilfish, I would.

Speaking as a DE player, I don't want them mucking up the rules for OT vehicles. They work just fine as is.

Maybe, maybe, give embarked units the benefit of any Invuln save the vehicle has vs templates, but if we have to sacrifice anything to get even that, it isn't worth it. The benefits of OT vehicles far outweigh their downsides. FAR outweigh.

Thanks for the input guys. I do agree open topped transports are great, for most units.

To clarify I'm not thinking OT transports need nerfed or even changed at all. They are my favorite unit type in the game to play.

What I am looking at is the effects of explodes results on the VIABILITY of mechanizing certain forces.

So really what I'm getting at is explodes damage as written is not a good rule.

It either does next to nothing against the armies that do run substantial mechanized forces, or else it completely invalidates certain armies that otherwise would consider mechanizing but can't effectively.

It doesn't scale so much as just bypass the normal mechanics of the game.

Currently 5 wyches will take the same percentage of casualties as 10 would.
Same for 10 boyz vs 20 boyz or fire warriors etc. Units should be able to overcome the explodes damage by adding models, otherwise there is a disincentive to take larger than minimum.

Anyway I believe the rule should be rewritten as such, and possibly also to account for the recent proliferation of ap 1-2 weapons.

I'd much prefer to see vehicles as a whole become more durable rather then introduce any open-topped passenger survivability boosts.

the glance mechanic just doesn't work for me. the idea that things like rending and haywire weapons are just as likely to harm AV10 vs AV14 is unbalanced. it creates weird scenarios where players are encouraged to use cheap anti-infantry weapons for anti-tank because volume of medium strength fire is more efficient than anti-tank weapons. pointing the equivalent of a 30mm gun at AV14 should be a waste of ammunition, not a strategy.

rather than removing hull points, I'd like to see glances have a chance to disrupt the vehicle's operation for a turn. maybe a reduction in movement distance or forcing a dangerous terrain test or lowering BS or some such. vehicles should have some sort of saving throw against this disruption based on AV; higher AV means more resilience to the point where it's very hard to disrupt high AV vehicles. it shouldn't be possible to stun-lock a vehicle via glances like in 5th, but pouring enough fire into it should have a chance to degrade it's performance for a turn.

this would move us toward a world where anti-tank actually requires anti-tank weapons instead of today's ubiquitous medium str, high RoF weapons (auto cannons, assault cannons, etc). sure, you might have a chance to disrupt a vehicle with one, but you're not going to wreck it.

this doesn't specifically address passenger survivability in OT vehicles, but it makes your OT vehicles less of a death trap. and really, if they're getting hit by anti-tank weapons, they should be going up in a great ball of fire with catastrophic consequences for the passengers. that's the price you pay for not having all that armor getting in the way of your assaults

I really would like to see vehicles have 4+ armor and extra armor increase it to 3+. It wouldn't stop any of the real anti vehicle guns like melta, missiles, lascannon, rail guns, etc but it would make "auto cannon" spam less effective against upgraded vehicles and greatly diminish the high str AP- shooting attacks. It wouldn't benefit skimmers as much as they have jink and most skimmers can't get extra armor.

 Vankraken wrote:
I really would like to see vehicles have 4+ armor and extra armor increase it to 3+. It wouldn't stop any of the real anti vehicle guns like melta, missiles, lascannon, rail guns, etc but it would make "auto cannon" spam less effective against upgraded vehicles and greatly diminish the high str AP- shooting attacks. It wouldn't benefit skimmers as much as they have jink and most skimmers can't get extra armor.

That is genius man. Gotta stew on that a bit now.

There was considerable discussion of something similar on another thread regarding vehicle armor saves, but the flat save option is interesting.

I think combining that with "if you don't kaboom it, it doesn't die" like in 5th ed would be far too much, but combined with the current vehicle damage rules, maybe.

The other idea I had proposed over there was a general vehicle durability buff: all vehicles except flyers and skimmers that have AV12 or better front or sides, or AV14-all-around with more than 4 HP get +1 hull points, and Explodes! gets changed to "lose an additional 1d3 hull points. If this depletes the last hull point, the vehicle explodes as usual". The vehicles I specifically wanted to exclude are: annihilation barge, catacomb command barge, ghost ark, doomsday ark, wave serpent, falcon, fire prism, night spinner, devilfish, skyray and hammerhead, though all the Harlequin and DE skimmers should get +1HP. My thinking is that inexpensive AV13 skimmers, nasty Jinkfest AV12 skimmers with mean firepower, and skimmers with access to +1 cover saves and better armor than a Predator really don't need another hull point. The Devilfish probably does, but I want to exclude it on the grounds that it makes no sense for the Devilfish to have 4HP while the Hammerhead and Skyray have 3, and giving them 4 would be too much.

Ok so after messing with those excellent ideas above, what about something simple like this:

All non skimmer type vehicles and all walkers get a 4+ armour save. Those with 4 hp also gain Invincible behemoth.
(leman russ variants unfortunately only have 3 hp although I suppose they could all gain +1 hp)

And yes this is targetted at leveling the field for non jinking mech like land raiders, battlewagons etc. and reducing the effectiveness and appeal of stupidly effective units like scatbikes.

If my Orks could saw the tops off my Naughts, I would.

How about add in that to do damage to a vehicle on a glancing hit, you have to roll over the ap value of the gun. So trying to glance stuff to death with auto cannons just became twice as difficult. Don't know how you could do something similar with pens. Maybe rework it so that the chart is flipped i.e. 0 would be explodes and 6 is shaken then your ap value is what you do minus d3.

dominuschao wrote:
Ok so after messing with those excellent ideas above, what about something simple like this:

All non skimmer type vehicles and all walkers get a 4+ armour save. Those with 4 hp also gain Invincible behemoth.
(leman russ variants unfortunately only have 3 hp although I suppose they could all gain +1 hp)

And yes this is targetted at leveling the field for non jinking mech like land raiders, battlewagons etc. and reducing the effectiveness and appeal of stupidly effective units like scatbikes.

That also serves to make Windriders with shuriken cannons slightly more attractive than scatter lasers, too (well, assuming that Bladestorm applies), which could have some meta-shifting effects. Yeah, the cannons are scarier to infantry and MCs, but the range is kind of a big deal.

For Russes - or maybe even all Heavy vehicles - I might consider giving them something like "all penetrating hits resolved against front armor get -1 on the vehicle damage chart". Now they can't be instakilled by lascannons, for example. Of course, Fire Dragons will still reduce them to slag (by hull point depletion if nothing else), but then again, they're designed for that.

 Icculus wrote:
Open Topped transports are amazing for several reasons. You can disembark from any point on the hull and ALL units inside can fire from ANY point on the hull.

So, as unrealistic as it may be, you can get 20 lootas to fire from the Grill of a battlewagon, all you have to do to draw line of sight is poke that AV14 front out from behind a LOS blocking cover and fire away.

But imagine a melta gun getting a penetrating hit on an open topped transport, the thing explodes on a 4+. 50% chance of it hurting the passengers inside.

So while it is much easier to wreck these vehicles, I think the benefits of open-topped actually outweigh the negatives.

I agree. Yet, I'm still butthurt about my non-transport vehicles being open-topped.....all of'em....