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What if damaging Superheavies were more complex?

This is purely a speculative/mental exercise thread. This hasn't been fully hashed out. Inspired by Vipiod's post in a thread in General chat.

Imagine Superheavies had a number of systems:
-Movement
-Each weapon
-Shields?

Any to-hit roll of a 6 "hits" a random section. Any successful to-hit roll of a 5 may hit a targetted system.

Each system has (total number of wounds on the model)/(total number of systems) Wounds, but each Wound suffered by a system is also suffered by the model.

When a system is at or below half it's wounds, the system is damaged:
-A weapon suffers a -1 hit/wound/damage
-Movement is halved
-Shields are reduced by 1 (5++ becomes a 6++)

When a system is reduced to 0 wounds, it becomes crippled:
-Weapons only hit/wound on 6s, and do D1
-Movement is reduced to 2"
-Shields are removed entirely

This would make facing Superheavies much more interesting (although this would need to be counterbalanced; most Superheavies are already bad).

What are your thoughts?

Good idea/bad idea?
Alternate ideas?
Polishing this idea?

Why do 5s let you target and 6s are random?

I think that there's a lot of bookkeeping involved in this, which will hit knight players hardest due to the quantity of superheavies they take.

Also, why would a pintle mounted stormbolter have the same wounds as the vehicles main gun?

I think that perhaps you could have the vehicle lose power as it dies, so that you have to pick each round whether you move, shoot etc.

EG a vehicle with 24 wounds and 6 weapons, M10. at 15 wounds, it has power to move 10 and fire 5 weapons, or move 9 and fire all 6. this decreases as it loses wounds, until it has 1 wound left - can fire a gun, or move and inch.

perhaps have main guns require 2 to use.

Perhaps it would be a better idea to group weapons into clusters - maybe Primary, Secondary and Defensive?

You could then have an option in the damage track that to avoid degrading stats that you lose a component?

If for, example, you had 3 degradation levels, you could opt to lose your Defensive weapons instead of dropping the 1st level, lose your Secondary weapons instead of suffering the 2nd level and lose your Primary weapon to avoid suffering the effects of the 3rd level. Possibly make the weapon losses a toggle selected at the start of the turn (assuming the remaining crew is focusing on unjamming, manning, jury-rigging or otherwise prioritizing damaged systems).

Example, a Shadowsword has taken enough damage to be reduced to the 3rd level. The player decides to make the Primary Weapon (the Volcano Cannon) and Secondary Weapons (the Lascannon sponsons) inoperative, but leaves the Defensive Weapons (The Heavy Bolters) active so the tank can retreat to reposition and suppress enemy troops as it does so. For this turn, the Shadowsword acts as if it has only taken one level of degradation, but would only fire the Heavy Bolters.

Next turn, the player desires to fire the Shadowsword’s Volcano Cannon. The tank suffers all three levels of degradation, but it can still shoot...

I think a lot of the upside is giving those fighting *against* the SH a way to diminish it, a way to do more than "fire at the one big thing" - so I think it'd be better as options for those firing at it as opposed to options for the controlling player.

As for bookkeeping, I'm not sure it's that huge a change - in a list with 3 big Superheavies, they now have roughly a dozen wound tracks instead of 3.

I could see it being too much bookwork if applied to LoWs in the 200-300 point range, but for anything in the 500pt+ class, it's still not a lot of bookwork per point.

I could see "Secondary" or "Defensive" weapons being assigned a class, so that having more small guns on a model wouldn't decrease the number of wounds required to destroy, say, a Pulsar. Ideally, there'd be custom wound layouts for movement and the big guns and/or other big systems, but the thought was to minimize additional rulemaking. It could be something like:
-Primary weapons: Half the model's entire HP
-Movement: 2x the M characteristic, but movement cannot exceed the remaining HP of the Movement system
-Secondary/Defensive weapons: 5HP


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 JNAProductions wrote:
Why do 5s let you target and 6s are random?

I was just spitballing. How random should it be? How controllable should it be?

Alternate schemes would be to reverse those, or to always be random, and/or to allow targetting subsystems but with a -1 to hit.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
As for Degrading - I'd think this'd replace the generic "degrading" statline.

The problem with basing it on the to-hit roll is that you reward volume-of-mid-power (battle cannons, heavy burst cannons, etc.) more than single-shot anti-tank guns (lascannons, etc.), which is already a problem with 8e.

I might suggest taking a leaf out of Warmachine's book and make all hits from most weapons target a random subsystem, then give more precise weapons the ability to pick their target.

The ignore damage chart stratagem also needs a rework/nerf.
It should be a 1/2 CP stratagem instead of allowing a flat out 'use the top row value' mechanism.

 skchsan wrote:
The ignore damage chart stratagem also needs a rework/nerf.
It should be a 1/2 CP stratagem instead of allowing a flat out 'use the top row value' mechanism.

Again 1 CP when you have 6 or 7 for a game isn't broken, 1CP when you have 20 CP is too cheap.

Bad idea.

Way too much book keeping.

KISS. Keep it simple stupid.

The current system is... goofy...

Case in point:

Shadowsword has around 1/2 inches of its left track poking around a corner in a city - the current rules that GW suggests are fine, says that ALL weapons on the vehicle can now see the target - even if NONE of them can actually draw LoS to the target - just the damn front of the track... Hell, the track is a good 3.5 inches from the sponsons - thats not an insignificant distance!

Bharring wrote:
IAs for bookkeeping, I'm not sure it's that huge a change - in a list with 3 big Superheavies, they now have roughly a dozen wound tracks instead of 3.

But you wouldn't be able to just look at the wound marker on the model's base to work out what it's stats are. You'd have to write down or remember which systems are damaged.

Slayer6 wrote:
The current system is... goofy...

The current system is deliberately simplified. And as someone who previously played RT with the vehicle rules expansion I think it's a good idea.