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How do!

Roughly spinning off from my thread about Splitting Fire in General Discussion.

Whilst generally seen as a good thing, it is a fairly common opinion that super specialists, such as Long Fangs kind of miss out, now everyone can do what was once special (if not necessarily unique) to them.

My proposal is to introduce the reverse, with a Concentrate Fire special rule. Not to be given out freely, but reserved for super specialist units to make them a bit more desirable.

Exact mechanic is open to discussion, but my initial thinking is that when the unit in question all shoot at the same target (perhaps tank or monster specifically?), each damage roll after the first gets some kind of bonus, represent them not only focussing fire on one target, but having the skill, experience and discipline to go for the same location.

Head cinematic canon is something like the Lascannon shooting a second or so before others, to create a breach, with the other shots aimed into that breach at the soft and squishy/important worky bits beneath. Really bloody hammer it.

This is of course not something I’ve particularly thought through, but the best threads seem to come from that.

Knee-jerk reaction, I don't like the sound of it. For starters, I'm not eager to create special rules so that a subfaction of marines can arbitrarily feel more special than their equivalents in other chapters. But putting aside my anti-marine bias, this sounds like something that would need to be taken on a unit-by-unit basis.

My craftworlders have tons of specialist units with limited range, so I'm not doing a ton of split-firing as-is. My specialists are also supposedly some of the best of the best of the best at what they do. So it would be weird to NOT give them this sort of benefit, but they also probably don't really NEED to be stronger either. Especially given that they're not usually tempted to split fire in the first place. So we'd be looking at extra rules to remember and extra power creep for arguably no benefit to the game experience. Eradicators ran into this. I'm more efficient if I put three guys into the same target instead of split-firing? Guess I'll just never split-fire and be twice as lethal then.

That said, I think there may be ways you could go about using some variation on the idea. Look at the Holy Trinity strat sisters have. You have to given your unit a mix of wargear that favors different types of targets (thus lowering its baseline efficiency against whatever they end up shooting at), but the strat lets you offset that limitation (and I assume surpass baseline performance but I haven't run the math). Although that strat falls into the realm of "kill more betterer" rules, so maybe it's a bad example.

Where I think this mechanic might shine is for units whose shooting you want to attach special rules to but don't want that special rule to get split-fired in 10 different directions. So for instance, maybe my warp spiders get an option like this:

NEW STRATAGEM
CRIMSON WEB KATA - 1CP
Use this stratagem during your Shooting phase when all models in a WARP SPIDERS unit target the same unit. Their ranged weapons are treated as Assault 1 until the end of the Shooting phase. Until the start of your next Command phase, halve the enemy unit's Movement stat and the results of any Charge tests.

Without getting bogged down in the specific example, the idea is that you're adding some versatility to what the warp spiders are capable of and tying it to their shooting, but you don't want this rule to let them web up 10 different enemy units at once. So you make it a rule that only kicks in when they focus fire.

This already exists.

It is called Total Obliteration and the Eradicators currently have it.

Total Obliteration: In your Shooting phase, each time this unit is selected to shoot, if it has not Advanced this turn, it can unleash total obliteration. If it does, select one enemy unit; models in this unit can shoot twice this phase, but they can only make attacks that target that enemy unit (and only if that enemy unit is an eligible target for those attacks).

I could see the following stratagem being an option, which would make it less overpowered than a flat bonus:

Concentrated Fire, 2CP.
If all models which shoot in this unit target the same enemy unit, then all shots have an additional -1 to AP. All wounds can only be applied to one model of your choice in that unit - excess hits & wounds are lost.

So if you are shooting all of your lascannons at a tank, then -1AP. If you shoot all your snipers at a unit of terminators, you can get -1AP and pick one model to target from the unit. Shoot all 4 lascannons at terminators and pop this stratagem, and you've wasted 2CP to get less kills, in all likelihood, but you can kill the special weapon if you want to.

Seems weird that my guard infantry squad would suddenly be better at sniping enemy sergeants/special weapons than actual sniper rifles though. Plus, failing to kill a guy in a multi-wound model squad could potentially result in a squad having more than one wounded model at a time. Which the game seems to be trying to avoid.

I tried thinking about something similar.

Ranked Fire 1 CP:
Stratagem (Universal, available to all factions)
"Massed infantry firing in synchronous burst can maintain horrendous amounts of firepower."
Play this stratagem when you declare a unit about to shoot. If the unit is composed of ten or more models and the unit does not split fire (all eligible models firing target the same enemy unit), all To Hit Rolls of six generate one additional hit.

What do you think?

StaevinTheAeldari wrote:
I tried thinking about something similar.

Ranked Fire 1 CP:
Stratagem (Universal, available to all factions)
"Massed infantry firing in synchronous burst can maintain horrendous amounts of firepower."
Play this stratagem when you declare a unit about to shoot. If the unit is composed of ten or more models and the unit does not split fire (all eligible models firing target the same enemy unit), all To Hit Rolls of six generate one additional hit.

What do you think?

Eh. Probably not broken for most units, but...
A.) There are probably at least a couple units in the vast list of 40k datasheets that can take 10 models in a squad and are a bit too good with exploding 6s. Especially given that you haven't restricted this strat to troops or specified that it only triggers for unmodified hit rolls.

B.) I don't think this really adds anything to the game except more lethality. I'm not a big fan of kill more betterer[b] stratagems in general, and this is pretty much just that. Are you fielding any squads of 10+ models? You may as well use this stratagem every time they shoot. The already too-lethal game becomes a bit more lethal. But then, maybe I'm biased; I'd like to see pretty much all stratagems that up killing power removed from the game.