FezzikDaBullgryn wrote:I guess my goal here was realism. A cloud of thick smoke is not cover, it's concealment, for both inside and outside. Thats why tanks still use it today. Because by a squad of tanks or even HMMWV use it still today, it creates a giant obscuring cloud. Now the defeater for a smoke screen is to just fire as much and as fast as possible into the smoke, and hope you hit something.
Well, the smoke stratagem currently used by marines and sisters seems like it represents this fairly well. It grants the targeted unit a -1 to being hit (so it acts as dense terrain that's hard to shoot through rather than "light cover" in the
40k sense that boost armor saves). Having an extra point of
AP doesn't help against this particular defense, but pumping lots of extra shots into the target does. The only thing that doesn't seem to be represented from this quoted portion is the idea of the smoke cloud being large enough to other units.
The challenge with your first pitch is that an aura of that size with that potent an effect has to be pretty costly to avoid being too powerful. So as an alternative, maybe you could try one of the following tweaks (not both) to the existing version of the Smoke stratagem:
* Add the option to spend an additional
CP when a vehicle benefitting from the Smoke strat is destroyed. If you do, all units forced to disembark by the vehicle's destruction are at -1 to hit for the rest of the round.
* Add the option to have spend X additional
CP when you first use the stratagem. For each extra
CP spent, you may extend the benefits of the stratagem to one additional unit within 6" of the first target.
The first option basically makes the passengers less tempting targets thus making both the rhino and the stratagem more valuable for keeping those units alive. The second option lets you protect multiple units with smoke, but you have to pay a
CP cost proportionate to the number of units benefitting from that protection.
Area of Effect (aura) rules are hard to price and balance in general because it's hard to predict how they'll scale. This was a big problem last edition when you had entire marine armies circling up around a few buff aura characters to optimize their offense, and it's probably one of the main reasons we've seen some auras turn into targeted buffs this edition.
What if that was the modifier? Before a charge is called, pay 2CP to make your charging units -1 to hit in overwatch?
I don't love that approach. Because it makes the smoke more valuable for melee armies than shooty armies and because "overwatch" modifiers kind of sort of aren't a thing (except when they are). A simpler implementation of this might be to introduce a stratagem similar to the following:
SMOKE GRENADE - 1CP (Might be too cheap?)
Use this stratagem during the Charge phase. Select an enemy unit within 18" of a SMOKE VEHICLE. That unit may not Overwatch this turn.