Couldn't sleep, so read the first half the of the main rules. As a result, the following are the groggy ramblings of a tired brain.
That is how this whole document was made.
* The term "TYPES". This is very much a nitpick, but these are essentially just keywords, right? Why the terminology change? "Type" makes me think of the classic infantry/beast/swarm types, whereas the dreadnaught example you give makes it seem like you want keyword-style flexibility.
That's a good catch, I think I may do away with keywords altogether as I only kept stuff like that in case I needed it later. Personally I dislike them, but I recall getting into arguments about this stuff in 5th/6th edition.
* How does AP work in this? I probably just missed the spot where it's spelled out. I expected saves to be a compared Sv vs Ap test, but the fighting and shooting action explanations both explicitly state that saves are characteristic tests rather than compared tests.
AP is Save-
AP, defender makes a test roll on their
AP. So if something with a Save of 8 got hit by something with an
AP of 3, then they would save on a 5 or below. This means automatic successes exist, which is intentional. I can go back and make it clearer, though probably not soon as I'm about to be shipped to Alaska.
* Compared Tests: these are basically just roll the target number or better and apply stat X and stat Y as modifiers", right?
Roll the target number or better yes. It could probably be worded better.
* Unit Strength. You mention half/quarter. Which seems weird given that you have morale tests happening at 66% and 33% of starting health. Feels like you may have changed your mind about what values trigger other rules somewhere along the way?
Ah yes, that is correct. I was messing around on
TTS and realized that having 3 times you could potentially become disordered is a little harsh, thank you.
* Alternating Activations: Don't hate the "activating units in groups of 3" thing, but this does mean that you can theoretically activate all 3 of your imperial knights at once or all 3 of your ravagers or what have you all at once. (Knights would probably be multi-activation units). See: any AA thread in this section of the forum for the pros and cons of doing things this way.
I hate Knights. I hate Knights so much. Having them as their own faction was even more obnoxious than the guard players who would just make parking lots of
AV 14 that you could do absolutely nothing about. It completely ruined the balance of the game and has permanently shackled
GW to this new "everything can hurt everything" system, where your only concern is dice efficiency rather than any sort of specialization.
* I don't see anything preventing me from using the same action type twice, and I'm not sure if that's intentional or not. Moving twice is essentially just a better version of Advancing. Double-tapping with your entire gunline on the other hand...
That's the reason for action fatigue, and why the ranged weapons all had their range reduced to 2/3. For most weapons, this means you will need to move into place to use them.
* As written, it looks like I can park a rhino in front of some devastators to make them untargetable while allowing them to shoot at anything they want because "friendly" models don't block line of sight?
At the moment yes, I've been debating on this one because on one hand I think your own units should be able to "shield" your better units, but on the other hand vehicles are huge bricks(that get more massive each edition...).
* I don't think I like action fatigue. For starters, it impacts various armies/units disproportionately. Ex: a fast unit that moves 12" is losing less than 10% of its movement to fatigue while a slow infantry unit that only moves 5" is losing 20% of its movement to fatigue.Simillarly, more accurate shooters lose a smaller percentage of their average hits compared to less accurate shooters. Plus, it seems like it favors shooty armies over melee armies. A squad of fire warriors that shoot and then move away every turn are hitting at full BS at the cost of a single inch of movement while the squad of blood letters chasing after them will suffer a -1 to-hit on the turn they finally close the gap.
That's fair. Orks, when I get around to them, are going to need a special rule to handle the multiple sources of -1 to
BS. However I will say most units are moving faster overall, and most armies are shooting worse overall, and the ranges are reduced. Using your fire warriors vs blood letters example, fire warriors get to shoot once Blood letters are within 20", at which point the blood letters will close the gap by 7" a turn assuming a featureless table. That is potentially 3 rounds of getting shot by fire warriors, an unpleasant experience for the blood letters. Once they close the distance, the fire warriors are dying horribly, bogged down, and are now a foot back from where they started.
I think for the problem units its something that could be solved by points adjustments, but do want to look at alternatives. I just don't like adding rules to patch problems, things like "usually you do thing X way, but in Y circumstance the rules for that do Z instead".
* Does fatigue impact a user's strength stat for purposes of melee weapons?
No.
* As I'm sure you're aware, limiting units to two actions is going to make any unit that normally does more than two things less valuable. My farseer on a bike, for instance, is normally pretty decent at moving, shooting, stabbing things, and casting psyhic powers somewhere along the way. In your system, he's ideally moving and casting and thus will probably never use his weapons. Or will use his weapons, but only if he's already been engaged by an enemy. I haven't read the faction rules yet, but have you taken this into account when pricing units?
Not too much, but at this stage I haven't run into that many units that got to do something every phase.
* Only letting models shoot one gun is going to be messy for units like centurions or shining spears that have multiple guns.
They get a rule. I might make a generic special rule for it, I just haven't calculated how many units there are that need something like that rather than were by coincidence able to do something silly like shoot a rifle and a pistol at the same time.
* Armorbane/Fleshbane: Are fine as written. Just wondering why you went with re-rolls instead of a flat to-wound modifier or flat to-wound values.
Re-rolls modify existing ability while flat modifiers expand existing ability.
* Blast: Hmm. Interesting. Don't hate it. Worry that the 1" splash damage might turn it into a "gotcha" weapon that encourages people to slow down the game when trying to hide units behind terrain.
Good point. My bigger concern about that one is actually using it to murder characters, but that might be a good thing.
* Poison works on vehicles as written.
Yes, that's fine. If a poison weapon also has an
AP strong enough to pierce the vehicle then by all means poison the crew.
* I like Flanking, but as written, the unit you're flanking with doesn't have to actually be threatening the "flanked" target. My dire avengers near the right board edge are potentially benefitting from "flanking" thanks to my striking scorpions on the left flank who are busy chopping up a completely different enemy unit. Not the worst weird interaction ever, but seemed worth mentioning.
Given that you're having people activate multiple units at a time, maybe this is a good opportunity to use that? Let units activated as part of the same activation flank with each other if they both promise to go after the same target?
That's a pretty good idea.
* Not allowing units to split fire means we're back to 5 man tactical squads with a melta wasting 4 bolter shots on an enemy vehicle so that the melta guy can shoot at his target of choice, right? Not as big a deal if everything can hurt everything, but probably still going to be annoying to people who's rather shoot the bolters at the gretching standing right next to the deff dread your melta guy is gunning for.
Fortunately,
GW is slowly doing away with this for me by making every unit mono weapon.
* I don't think I like Disordered. The old "physically run away" mechanic was complained about a fair bit back in the day. Losing functionally 2 turns of your melee unit's movement can basically mean that they're not allowed to participate in the rest of the game. Plus, trying to figure out the proper route for running away can get surprisingly clunky. And if you then have other units start running away because of the first unit... I feel like that's going to be more annoying than fun for a lot of people.
That's fair. I've considered the cardinal directions. I've also considered just having everything be old pinning, or doing away with morale. No one really likes morale unless they have built their army to abuse it. If anything, it might be better to have almost all factions be fearless and have a few that implement some kind of "cowardice" mechanic.
* Open-Topped: I see and like what you're going for, but the wording probably needs to be tightened up/clarified a little. As written, you're technically allowed to "move" with an embarked unit that technically isn't on the table, for instance. Also, having to spend 3 activations to move a raider out of cover and shoot with the two warrior squads inside seems like a bit of a bummer given that drukhari kind of need to hit en masse to work. Maybe just steal a note from 10th's playbook and treat the open-topped transport as having all the embarked models' guns and melee attacks?
That would work, I'd need to say something about weapon skill.
* Transports: As written, you'd have to use an action to disembark, then another action to move, then be out of actions to do anything else. This means that transports are way less valuable to units that need to get close to do their jobs. No fire dragons running forward out of falcons to shoot their meltas. No wyches hopping out of raiders and sprinting towards the enemy before charging.
I'll have to think about that, I never really liked the way transports could be used to have a unit truly leap across the board. It has also lead me several times into the situation of "how did your raider which was 26 away manage to get guys to charge me?" because measuring systems are also bad but we're married to them unless you're playing battletech.
Overall, I feel like you have a lot of neat ideas, but I'm not sure how well they'll all interact. Additionally, I feel like the 2-action system is probably going to create a lot of problems for you, and I'm not really seeing much value added by it in return.
The main things I like are:
* The multi-unit AA activations. Although I feel like there may still be room for improvement.
* Flanking. Though again, I feel like it could maybe be tweaked somehow.
* Being able to stab things while inside an open-topped transport.
I'll probably keep reading and commenting when I have more time.
Thanks, I'll take everything into consideration. My time won't open for more proper testing for a while, but I'll ponder your thoughts. A lot of times when working on a big project like this it's hard for one to see obvious things.
vict0988 wrote:The format isn't search friendly, seeker missile is actually seekermissile if I want to look up the rules for it. If you're not planning on printing everything you might as well have each datasheet on a page of its own to make things look a bit better.
For future projects consider having everything that's needed together in the same place so one of the following:
#1: have all the wargear rules and pts on the datasheet.
#2: move the unit size and options available to the unit to the points section and have all the unit stats (WS/BS/S/T...) in a big block together with all the other units with abilities listed and then all abilities listed after the big block in alphabetical order.
I don't know whether your core rules describe what happens when a unit's Toughness or Sv is halved, if not that's something you need to add. Consider making Infiltrate into Infiltrate (X) to make your abilities more adaptable. I like that you don't give everything needless unique names and stick to just calling it invulnerable, but it's going to turn some people off from your rule set. Good luck with getting it finished and tested. You can send me a PM if you want me to give your Necrons rules a read when they're done.
I can fix the searchability/add tags. Having wargear on the datasheet increases my chance of typos, and as I am eternally tired this is already a major problem. I think if I used a different word editor I could hyperlink everything into a way that's easy to maintain, but I'll have to look into it.
For halving, I'm actually intentionally trying to avoid stuff like that as much as possible. It makes things harder to balance. I'm even considering just switching all x2 weapons to +4 or something.
