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This is aimed at reducing 2 issues:

Issue 1: It has been well established that 2+ save models are not durable enough to reflect their supposed durability in this edition
Issue 2: Since vehicles have lost their armour facings, it has rendered almost all manoeuvring unnecessary. if out of range, move forwards.

Possible Solution:

Bring back armour values and facings on Vehicles, as a replacement for Toughness. Keep wounds and saves as is. This means that we have 2 different "to wound" systems, both of which are quite simple to use; the normal S vs T chart, and the S+D6 vs AV.

The key difference in these 2 systems is that in the normal system, everything can hurt everything. In the armour value system, there is a limit on what can hurt the vehicle. I propose that glancing hits (equalling the AV) always do a single damage, no matter what the damage stat of the weapon. Penetrating hits (Exceeding AV) would do normal damage. A roll of a 1, provided it is enough to equal or exceed the AV, will always only glance.

With this mechanic, you can give certain units which lack their supposed durability an AV vs shooting instead of a T. For Example, give Terminators AV9 against shooting. This makes them more durable against small arms, which they need, without making them monsters which can't be stopped - they would still have a toughness in CC, and lascannons etc will be a little more effective against them, as a hit will always result in potential damage (if they don't save). As a lascannon should.

By making anti-tank more effective at anti-tank than anti-infantry, we can split things into 2 classes. Then, move specialist units (termies, meganobs) into the "needs anti-tank" bracket.

Thoughts?

OK, so I can see the issue here is that people don't want to be punished for bringing massed anti-infantry when the enemy has massed tanks; in previous editions, the tanks were easier to kill using anti-tank, but impossible to kill without it, so it became a gamble - bring all tanks, and if the opponent has decent anti-tank, you've lost, if they don't you've won.

The aim of this was to increase the need to move. So, what if the vehicles have AV front and side, but T on the rear?

This way, everything can hurt a tank from behind. but not everything can take them head-on. in CC you would go against toughness.

If you give a universal front & side armour to each vehicle (IE the front and side armour is the same for each vehicle, not different to one another) the arcs become a bit less worrisome, and most awkward vehicles have pointy fronts and square-ish rears. Simply draw a line across the back of your tank - if the attacker is behind you, they target your toughness, if they are in front, they target your armour. keeps it much simpler to work out, whatever shape your tank is.

I would love to see firing arcs come back as well, I think it's ludicrous that a leman russ can fire every gun out of it's right hand rear track guard, around a corner. it wasn't complicated before. I never heard anyone complain about it. but they got rid of it anyway.

As for the facings on a terminator, I wouldn't have any "facings", I'd simply state that against shooting they are AV9. Glancing hits cause 1 wound, as per vehicles. so a lasdcannon hits a termy and rolls a 1, if it isn't saved then it only does 1 damage. Against CC, they are T4 as normal.

pm713 wrote:
The problem with fire arcs was that I almost always had at least one gun that did nothing and it seemed really stupid that one gunner is just having a drink watching the scenery rather than shooting.

Easily remedied by allowing the tanks to split fire.

I wasn't proposing this idea just to have something to stick on terminators, it just happened that it allowed a different scale of damage resistance which Terminators would benefit from.

I agree that having high wounds and save on vehicles, whilst also making them immune to small arms, would probably be too much.

Perhaps an overhaul of the wounds characteristics of all the vehicles would be in order. Bear in mind, though, that the main anti-tank weapons of this edition are all D6 damage, so if we assume an average roll of 3.5 and remember when vehicles had 3HP, we get 10-11 wounds. 12 would be a good basis, I think, as it is the boundary for being 2-shotted by a lascannon. light vehicles must have below 12 wounds, heavy vehicles should have over 12 wounds.

Wyldhunt wrote:

I'd argue that that's bad for non-tournament/competitive games. As Lance points out, that creates an extra barrier to entry. You shouldn't have to follow tournament rankings and forum threads discussing list optimization just to avoid being punished for liking the fluff/look/playstyle of a unit that isn't competitive in the meta. If two newbies put together lists that they link look cool and have a game, they should be able to have a good game. It shouldn't be a blowout because one guy thought tactical marines looked cool and the other guy wanted a tank regiment.

I think the issue is that GW decided that the solution to help people make TAC lists is to make everything TAC. But the result is that people zeroed in on what was the best TAC and spammed that.

If you reduced the randomness of heavy weapons to some extent (EG changing lascannons from D6 damage to 2D3, or just a flat 6!) then having vehicles which can't be hurt by small arms is fine, because the heavy weapons will deal with them.

And whilst I think that it isn't going to be the best introduction for a noob, I do believe that if you bring a list which cannot bring down tanks, you deserve to get rolled over by tanks.

It is also worth noting that the parking lot was usually an easy thing to crack with melee and getting behind them.

I guess I'm just nostalgic for the time when every army you faced was a bit of a challenge, and required clever thinking and tactics to get the most out of your army against theirs. Now, shoot from whatever angle you like, at whatever you like. the hardest thing to work out is to shoot high strength high damage weapons at high toughness high wound models. It's not a challenge.

 Brother Castor wrote:
Wasn't one of the key tenets of 8th edition that everything had the possibility of wounding everything else?

And that isn't necessarily a good thing.

I would not expect my gretchin to stand a chance of taking a wound off a landraider by punching it. It's needless mollycoddling to remove the consequence of poor listbuilding and bad balancing. It's not just a symptom of the snowflake generation, it's a cause.

I honestly think that a hefty backtrack is needed here. Bring back the force organisation chart, Bring back armour facings. The issue with making armour good this edition is that it will make spam too powerful. so get rid of spam, and the problem lessens. If you only have a few slots for powerful tanks, and are therefore forced to bring a mixed army to the table, then the game will become more balanced. Allowing you to bring anything you like and allowing anything to hurt anything is like allowing a child to do whatever it wants. It spoils it. Without rules and consequence, the game will become meaningless.

the dual force org system in 7th worked well, I think. The current issue is that people can bring more powerful units with less of the "tax" of having a coherent army. "take whatever you want" was an occasional houserule amongst friends, it shouldn't have become the actual rules.

As for the issue that people will target the enemy's anti-tank is a tactical thing, and can be addressed in the balancing of the game; a 100pt tank should not need 100pts of anti-tank to take it out. It is paying points for immunity to small arms, and the speed and firepower which being a tank provides. 50pts of anti-tank should stand a chance of taking out 100pts of tank. Making anti-tank weapons more powerful by increasing their damage stat will help. I would probably make them a little more pricey as well, as you don't want lascannon spam to be the next big thing. they should be too expensive to be effective at shooting infantry, and cheap enough to be effective at blowing tanks up.

As such, an army which is 50:50 anti-tank and anti-infantry should be able to cope with an army of all tanks. Bear in mind, a lot of the tanks need infantry squads to go in them!

I'm actually wondering whether you could do the opposite of what they did with 8th and give everything an armour value...

By using the system of:

S+D6 vs T
if S+D6 = T then it's a glancing blow
if S+D6 > T it's a penetrating blow
if the D6 is a 1, it cannot be more than a glancing blow.

Assuming we keep the strength of weapons the same:
Gretchin: T6 (S2 wounds on a 4+, S5 weapons auto-wound)
Guardsman: T7 (S3 wounds on a 4+, S6 auto-wounds)
Marine: T8 (S4 wounds on a 4+, immune to S1, S7 auto-wounds)
Terminator: T9 (S5 wounds on a 4+, immune to S2, S8 auto-wounds)
Trukk: T10 (S6 wounds on 4+, immune to S3, S9 auto-wounds)
Rhino: T11 (S7 wounds on a 4+, immune to S4, S10 auto-wounds)
Dreadnaught: T12 (S8 wounds on 4+, immune to S5, S11 auto-wounds)
Vindicator: T13 (S9 wounds on 4+, immune to S6, S12 auto-wounds)
Landraider: T14 (S10 woundson 4+, immune to S7, S13 auto-wounds)

If you then add a rule to non-walker vehicles:

Cumbersome: When this model is attacked in close combat, The attacking models add +2 to their to wound roll.

This represents the units targeting weak spots.


This doesn't do a lot for the manoeuvring aspect, but it would unify the rules whilst still allowing some units to be immune to some weapons. Elite units become harder to kill with small arms, but weaker to high power. Lascannons shooting at terminators will always wound if they hit, but rolling a 1 to wound means only 1 damage.

If you also put armour facings back on vehicles it would add manoeuvring back in. It's just an interesting thought, I'm not seriously proposing that it be done!

 Luke_Prowler wrote:
Knights were an auto win against Orks.

I actually won a game against knights with a grot horde, 2 weirdboys and a dakkajet, and actually killed 1. It helped that one of the weirdboys rolled the "get uber" perils of the warp every turn, and beat the snot out of one of the knights. He was convinced he'd just crush me! Dakkajet arrived late but chipped the last 2 HP off the knight. meanwhile, the board was mine, every objective was mine, and I won on VP by a factor of about 8.

Not bad considering I had 3 models which could actually hurt a knight, and all of them only glanced on 6's (except when the weirdboy went uber!).

I guess the main aim is to bring back thinking about where you put your models. Armour facings were a means to this end, but if you simply give +1 to wound against the rear of a vehicle, it will encourage getting behind them.

I would certainly like to bring back firing arcs on vehicles... the current system is way too abstract for my liking.