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There's already too many negs to hit, invluns and 2+ units in the game for cover interact with a d6 system in any way that doesn't end up a broken mess. That design space is gone.

There are too many units/armies that straight up ignore cover modifiers for it to impact the game at the level it should. IF artillery armies might as well be playing on planet bowling ball.

GW dropped the ball in 8th edition on so many levels. I like the old fantasy ruling where you can shoot into and out of forests but not through. Shooting through/over terrain should give some sort of penalty to hit or bonus to defense but it just won't work the way the game is currently constructed.

True LOS is a pox on the game as seeing the banner of my bike means you can shoot the whole unit without penalty. I know it's supposed to be an abstraction but model to body of model would be a much better way of handling it IMHO. Also, no modifying a models profile during the game should be a rule (no swinging turrets, no raising/lowering arms, no opening/closing doors).

There's so much cool stuff GW could have done with terrain in this game and they chose the absolute laziest way to go about it. ITC tried to fix their mess but has opened up Pandora's box and now we have magic boxes and entire armies hiding in ruins.

Being able to destroy a building would be awesome and thematic. Taking penalties for shooting through your own army makes a lot of sense (probably not your own unit though). Successive modifiers for shooting through your army, through a window of a ruin and through a wall would add much needed tactical depth to the game. Having to model doorways so that models can get into/out of buildings and create choke points would make the game so much more strategic and immersive.

But GW has hamstrung itself with it's poor game design, the limitation of the d6 system (only so many modifiers you can stack on it) and greed. If the marketing department was half the size and the game design unit was twice the size the game would be much more enjoyable but adverts of a simple, most playtest game turns out to sell more units than an actually well balanced game.

At this point 9th can't come fast enough for me. Hopefully GW has learned some lessons from this beta version but I honestly think that is a pipe dream given the financial success of 8th. Why spend more creating a better game when the same gak sandwich sells...

Make it so you can shoot into but not through terrain.
Give models a "Size" stat and have silhouettes associated with each size (like infinity does), when checking LoS, use the silhouettes to see if the models see each other. This stat would also determine base size so there would be an official dataset on that.

these two changes would be a good start to making the games less lethal. At least in my opinion.

I am aware of design trade off. My degree is in game design. In order for design trade off to be in effect there has to be some positives with the negatives to balance the choices. Hormagaunts and termagants need their rerolling 1s to make use of their midling to crap bs/ws/str. Which is why anyone who does take them takes them in groups of 30. Loosing that so they can sit in terrain and still die because their 6+ save might be a 5+ save is an over all negative because they will still loose any ability to have any positive impact on the field while still dying fast. Except now they have restrictions in how they can move and how they have to spread out in order to get the "benefit" of terrain.

The thing you think would happen wont because your sacrificing your positive benefit for multiple negatives and the potential for a possitive that is not as good as the one you lost.

Thats not a design trade off. Its idiocy.

I just hope that the fix to terrain problems in 9th ed is not going to be making people buy official GW terrain and battle boards.

 Daedalus81 wrote:
I'm gonna throw something out here, because a lot of these proposals don't even begin to help daemons.

Cover should provide a -1 to hit modifier that is not stackable (you can still stack other negatives as you wish).

Because -1 hit modifiers worked so well in this edition? Sorry, not a fan of halving some army's shooting gutted while other basically don't care because high BS and re-rolls everywhere.

But I get what you are trying to say, whoever daemons not being affected by cover (or reality in general) has kind of always been their thing.


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chaos0xomega wrote:

Almost all existing and suggested terrain rules favor shooting units over CC units though.
Reduced movement, movement blocking, rules for charging up in ruins, for fighting stuff above you and area terrain all favor shooting units.
In my experience terrain only ever helps ranged armies, never those focused on getting into melee.

Thats a very twisted perspective, one that I don't think the vast majority of players would agree with.

It's not twisted, it's experience. The vast majority of players also isn't running melee units that don't fly or just appear next to their opponents.
It's a fact that a unit sitting on the top level of a ruin is immune to close combat from any non-infantry unit and protected from infantry since they increase the charge distance and reduce the number of models that can fight.
It's also a matter of fact that a unit must go around any LOS blocker they want to benefit from and thus lose movement. For any unit that does not have 12"+ movement speed, this will cost them a turn or more of movement. It's also very much within your opponent's power to force you to cross some terrain without cover, while most shooting units can just sit in cover all game long.

Generally speaking, terrain HELPS melee units, which tend to be more vulnerable to ranged attack, by increasing their survivability as they approach their targets and by hampering the effectiveness of ranged attacks in general by obscuring line of sight or providing their targets with benefits which make the lethality of ranged attacks less effective.

That's how it should be. However, the increasing surviveability part is not working, or at lest not well enough, and obscuring a target doesn't do anything right now unless you are completely hidden out of sight.

Beyond that, any benefit that ranged armies would derive from terrain was historically counterbalanced by the fact that CC was significantly more lethal than shooting.

If you arm a unit like assault terminators, nobz or wraithguard to the teeth and charge them into a shooting unit of equal points, you'll find that close combat isn't very lethal at all. Getting to fight once or twice per game while taking damage back rarely, if ever, compares to just shooting stuff with similar number of attacks, strength and damage from 24"-48" away.

Mostly melee units suck because units can just step out of melee with little or no penalty to the army they belong to.
Melee units go through a turn or two of hellfire to get to the enemy then either single shot them and can't consolidate far enough to tag another unit leaving them stuck out in the middle of nowhere or they fail to kill the enemy and knowing damned well they'll be dead the next turn the enemy is simply pulled back before the shooting phase leaving the melee unit stuck out in the middle of nowhere.

There should be a response to units wussing out of combat.

 Jidmah wrote:


Because -1 hit modifiers worked so well in this edition? Sorry, not a fan of halving some army's shooting gutted while other basically don't care because high BS and re-rolls everywhere.

But I get what you are trying to say, whoever daemons not being affected by cover (or reality in general) has kind of always been their thing.

We kind of want to gut shooting don't we? Forests used to give -1 to hit. It was pretty common. Sure, Orks suffer most, but they also benefit to a point where they can lean on melee or use their fast units to get around to the side of cover.

The armies best at shooting suffer least. You just made all marines even better at gunning down melee units, because it's even harder to remove their shooting units from cover.

 Jidmah wrote:
The armies best at shooting suffer least. You just made all marines even better at gunning down melee units, because it's even harder to remove their shooting units from cover.

They get "better" if fewer of them die, sure. Say you kill two previously, but kill half as many now.

Are Orks pulling Intercessors out of cover with shooting now? I doubt it (barring smasha spam with no other targets). Even 10 TBs would struggle to kill 3. Better to charge and put a BC or Klaw on them and take fewer casualties going in on top of getting benefit on top of the KFF.

Bananathug has the correction on LoS right.

Also re-introduce different interactions such as take cover or go to ground. After movement a player may declare such at which point interaction changes. For instance LoS isnt important so long as bases are fully behind relevant terrain. Here we may prescribe levels of terrain perhaps but no need to walk around with standard silouhettes for different models.

I would like to see other interactions reintroduced such as overwatch and others... plus templates actually or at least an option to use more fine grained rules as standard but optional...

I would also like to see ranges halved and movement stat returned with marines and orks moving 4, eldar 6 and crons from 2 to 5 ... nids from 3 to 7, etc...

 Dakka Wolf wrote:

There should be a response to units wussing out of combat.

Absolutely. For symmetry's sake Overwatch's melee equivalent should exist. Attack of Opportunity, you get to strike the fleeing unit but only hit on sixes. It's not much, but it would be something.

 Crimson wrote:

 Dakka Wolf wrote:

There should be a response to units wussing out of combat.

Absolutely. For symmetry's sake Overwatch's melee equivalent should exist. Attack of Opportunity, you get to strike the fleeing unit but only hit on sixes. It's not much, but it would be something.

I'm a firm believe in this and been asking for it, but with no melee on both players turns, and more limitations to falling back.

Maybe running from combat should incure some sort of debuff or the unit gets wacked an extra time by the dudes that charged them?

 Crimson wrote:

 Dakka Wolf wrote:

There should be a response to units wussing out of combat.

Absolutely. For symmetry's sake Overwatch's melee equivalent should exist. Attack of Opportunity, you get to strike the fleeing unit but only hit on sixes. It's not much, but it would be something.

If symmetry is what you want then after a unit shoots in the shooting phase the opponent should be able to pick a unit to shoot back. Overwatch is a crap thing that mostly does nothing. I get that melee units wish there was something to prevent falling back but "melee overwatch" won't stop anything.

Honestly, there is something to prevent falling back: 3-cornering.

Also, like a melee unit succeeded even if the enemy unit falls back, as long as it survives the backswing on the turn it charged then the falling-back units are basically out of the fight for a bit.

I feel like melee is really powerful this edition.

Overwatch fulfills a function, discouraging you from multicharging literally everything within 12" to see what you can reach, but I'd like to see a more elegant and faster method of achieving that. Overwatch rarely actually kills a meaningful value of models, which the exception of a few outliers like Repentia with a 7+ armor save, so I'd like to either see something fast and easy to replace it, like -1 to charge for each declared charge target after the first.
Alternatively, it would need to be powerful option like Flames of War's "if you pin or bail the enemy in defensive fire, the charge fails."

The melee overwatch on fall back thing has been suggested a few times which in way could offer something, but a couple of successful hits that is likely to do anything meaningful is usually just a slow down to the game flow.

Would be good if there were other consequences to falling back that the other player can respond to, such as if a unit falls back than the unit it fell back from can make a free consolidate move (whether fixed range or random like a D6 potentially even catching the unit that fell back and keeping them in combat)

Even something like 1 mortal wound per 5 models, at least that way the player pays some sort of price for opening the enemy unit to shooting at them.

Melee in 8th outside a few scenarios is very much a secondary facet of a game dominated by the shooting phase.

 NurglesR0T wrote:
The melee overwatch on fall back thing has been suggested a few times which in way could offer something, but a couple of successful hits that is likely to do anything meaningful is usually just a slow down to the game flow.

Would be good if there were other consequences to falling back that the other player can respond to, such as if a unit falls back than the unit it fell back from can make a free consolidate move (whether fixed range or random like a D6 potentially even catching the unit that fell back and keeping them in combat)

Even something like 1 mortal wound per 5 models, at least that way the player pays some sort of price for opening the enemy unit to shooting at them.

Melee in 8th outside a few scenarios is very much a secondary facet of a game dominated by the shooting phase.

You would at the same time make melee as strong as shooting b.c there is no double combats anymore. You shouldn't be hitting on 6's at all, make it your "WS and higher with no mods or rerolls to hit" as they turned their back and running. This will make melee stronger without having to change all the numbers of everyone, if you stand and fight they don't get that free hit against you, if you run you might die.

It should be dangerous to fallback, as it is dangerous to stand in front of a unit shooting you.

 Inquisitor Lord Katherine wrote:
Honestly, there is something to prevent falling back: 3-cornering.

Also, like a melee unit succeeded even if the enemy unit falls back, as long as it survives the backswing on the turn it charged then the falling-back units are basically out of the fight for a bit.

I feel like melee is really powerful this edition.

Overwatch fulfills a function, discouraging you from multicharging literally everything within 12" to see what you can reach, but I'd like to see a more elegant and faster method of achieving that. Overwatch rarely actually kills a meaningful value of models, which the exception of a few outliers like Repentia with a 7+ armor save, so I'd like to either see something fast and easy to replace it, like -1 to charge for each declared charge target after the first.
Alternatively, it would need to be powerful option like Flames of War's "if you pin or bail the enemy in defensive fire, the charge fails."

Three-pointing is one of those "invisible mechanics" that makes melee so broken currently. I hate that part of the power budget of melee is 6" of extremely wonky movement, the ability to three-point and totally turn off falling back, and shooting immunity if you successfully three-point.

For starters, many people just..don't know those mechanics exist, as they're not really upfront with them in the rules and they feel "power gamey". And when they are successfully employed, they WILDLY swing the power of melee - basically, if your opponent can't fall back, you deal double damage to them (attacking in the opponent's turn) and you grant yourself total immunity to shooting. Thats an enormous power spike.

Apocalypse's melee system is just flatly superior in nearly every way. The only flaw it has in my eyes is making the shooting weapons melee units are equipped with just pointless.

For starters, unit coherency is greatly reduced. 0.5" from model to model, and if your unit is over 5 members you must be within 0.5" of at least two other models in the unit. That greatly reduces the power of screens and the power of melee tie-up blobs.

Then, overwatch is gone. No longer necessary if you can't blob up and tie up an entire enemy army with a speculative charge.

Then, attacking in the opponent's turn is gone. Staying in combat means your opponent attacks you with CC attacks, you don't get swings in their turn, they don't get swings in yours. Of course, models take saves and die at the end of the batle round, too, so that doesn't create crazy alpha strike situations either.

Then, pile in and consolidate is gone, as are random charge moves. Your charge move is your move stat X2, and you don't get to attack with any shooting weapons. Charging no longer offers weird amounts of free movement to super-slow models, and super-fast models can no longer roll a 2 4" away from enemy units. One model in contact with the enemy means the unit gets to fight. Simple, clean, you no longer have to move every model in an assault unit 4 separate times in a turn to use them.

Fall back preventing shooting unless you fly is still a thing. Enemy units can either choose to punch you back, or they can fall back and you can shoot them with the rest of your army.

Easy. Simple. Reliable. no longer has crazy reward spikes for pulling off little gamey micro maneuvers. Deep strike assault units no longer need 200 points+4CP of support to do their job.

 Inquisitor Lord Katherine wrote:
Overwatch fulfills a function, discouraging you from multicharging literally everything within 12" to see what you can reach

I've yet to hear a compelling explanation for why this is a problem. We already have the very game-y mechanic of piling into/consolidating into additional units, so it's already not that hard to tie up additional units while avoiding Overwatch. Would it really break things if players tried for that 1-in-12 chance of making an 11" charge more often?

3 pointing is an example of whats called emergent gameplay. Its not a mechanic written into the rules. Its a emergent element that occurs naturally because of the mechanics that exist. 3 pointing may or may not be an intentional effect of their design.

CP farming is another example.

That being said some of the best elements in games are emergent game play that is designed for that enhances the experience. Something that elevates the gameplay to being more than the sum of it parts. I wouldnt say 40k pulls that off anywhere.

It also dones't stop all units, anything with fly is immune to "3 pointing" and good play play on both sides makes it very hard to do anyways.

bananathug wrote:
There's already too many negs to hit, invluns and 2+ units in the game for cover interact with a d6 system in any way that doesn't end up a broken mess.

Epic I believe limited it to a max -2. Could be an idea now.

What if cover gave -1 to wound or all wound rolls of 1&2 fail (maybe even 1,2, & 3). I think the -1 to wound would be too much for some armies, while wound auto fail numbers would work like the cover saves, but would still allow for saves or work when attacked with large AP attacks

 Amishprn86 wrote:
It also dones't stop all units, anything with fly is immune to "3 pointing" and good play play on both sides makes it very hard to do anyways.

I always hear the shooting player just say "but 3-pointing exists so melee is super powerful". It doesnt work against fly, knights(or other units that can walk out of combat) or units that can fight back and you are also not allowed to hit the unit your are trying to 3 point in most cases since killing even 1 model can stop it all together. You also need a large unit since 1-2 models cant surround a model either so melee characters, monsters and walkers cant do it. And even if you 3 point something you still need to be able to kill it in their melee phase or your unit, that is most likely very expensive since all good melee units are, will be stuck and not do anything either. The melee unit is still open to a countercharge even if they are stuck in combat so they arent invulnerable. Most armies do have some good melee units that work well for this.

And to stop a 3point you just put your screens closer together, preferably next to terrain or another unit to prevent being wrapped. Sure you might lose an extra 30-60pt unit against the charging melee unit but they cant 3point and be safe in your shooting phase and now they are right in the open in front of your guns.

Might be easier for armies like orks to stop shooting since they can get charges off with 30man units that dont really care about loosing a few models to overwatch and can just spread out and touch as many units as possible. But for armies like BA its harder than you think. Had a game recently in which my opponent screened and deployed really badly so in turn 1 I killed 4 of his characters 1 knight and left another at 2wounds, But since BA models are expensive I lost about 600pts in my own turn 1 due to overwatch, return hits and explosions and had 0 CP left. Even in optimal situations I had to spend so many resources to do that amount of damage against someone that misplayed. A gunline list wouldnt have lost a model in that situation and would have most of their CP left. Half the time for a melee army its mutual destruction even if we get there. Its not like my 1000pts of BA can kill 2000pts of the enemy as soon as I get over in to their lines, melee are a bit more deadly point for point than range but except for smash captains fueled by CP not as much as people think,

Less deadly shooting, better terrain and los rules and a bit slower movement, even for melee units and the game would be so much better. Shooting is so deadly that if your melee unit is getting caught in the open for 1 turn its dead so you either need ton of LOS blocking terrain, that also gives cover(or you will die to artillery instead) or the ability to charge out of deepstrike/turn 1 so they dont even get the chance to shoot first. Preferably with an ignore overwatch ability since some units elite armies cant even charge. An IH leviathan dread kills every unit in my army except for my 300pt sanguinary guard unit with a 64pt support character with a relic banner on overwatch and it still kills almost 150pts of them and I still need to roll high enough to make that charge. Everything is so extreme right now. You see a banner through 3 buildings and can kill the whole unit. Units move and charge ridiculous distances and you can have 100pt characters turn 1 solo 700pt knights and single model can smoke half an army on overwatch alone. Some entire armies are easier to kill than any 1 out of 4 dreads in an IH list. Easiest fix that effects all armies are to make changes to the terrain/los rules to make it more gradient and impactful and then GW can fix the other broken stuff.

Three pointing always seemed to me like a gamey exploit. It shouldn't exist and the normal rules for fleeing from combat should be more restrictive instead.

Personally I'm aboard the Cover should be negatives to hit not positives to save.

Negative to hit to a max of a 6+ needed. Then depending on the terrain depends on the negative to hit.

Ruins -2. Shrubs/forrest and craters -1 so on so fourth.

 Crimson wrote:
Three pointing always seemed to me like a gamey exploit. It shouldn't exist and the normal rules for fleeing from combat should be more restrictive instead.

Agree. For what I care, if I get to attack once more when you leave combat, feel free to move through my models to do so. I also really like the idea that charges are 2x movement instead of random dice.


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 SeanDavid1991 wrote:
Personally I'm aboard the Cover should be negatives to hit not positives to save.

Negative to hit to a max of a 6+ needed. Then depending on the terrain depends on the negative to hit.

Ruins -2. Shrubs/forrest and craters -1 so on so fourth.

I'd rather introduce another layer of saves for cover, for example rolling a 4+ to ignore a hit for ruins, 5+ for craters. While it takes more time, I don't see why a ruin should be more efficient at blocking a plasma gun fired by a guardsman than one fired by a veteran or space marine.

So an IH warlord dread would roll his save, his FnP, his terrain cover and then redirect any wounds to an intercessor, who would then roll his FnP and cover? that is a lot of saves.

[quote=J


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 SeanDavid1991 wrote:
Personally I'm aboard the Cover should be negatives to hit not positives to save.

Negative to hit to a max of a 6+ needed. Then depending on the terrain depends on the negative to hit.

Ruins -2. Shrubs/forrest and craters -1 so on so fourth.

I'd rather introduce another layer of saves for cover, for example rolling a 4+ to ignore a hit for ruins, 5+ for craters. While it takes more time, I don't see why a ruin should be more efficient at blocking a plasma gun fired by a guardsman than one fired by a veteran or space marine.

But that would add wayyy too many dice IMO. If you do negatives to hit that just simplifies things. You could even bring back old battlefield conditions with ease. Fighting on a swamp world, -1 to hit over 15" because of mist. Doing negatives to hit then doesn't cause annoying scenarios such as scouts getting 3/2+ saves and being nigh invincible in a terrain piece.

Yeah it may be harder to hit them, but when you do hit them that doesn;t change the fact they don't wear much armour.

Only this greatly buffs armies that can stack those mods, which is mostly eldar. If rangers could get -1 for mist, -1 for being in terrain, -1 for being alaitoc and anothe -1 for being rangers or from stratagems, then we are looking at models that sometimes are being hit on a +6 by space marines, and other armies can't hit them with shoting at all.

And saying just use melee units, won't work, when all other armies beat melee armies easily. It would just be creating a situaiton that favours one specific eldar build again. We already had that in 8th.