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'This discussion highlights the difference in philosophy between 8th/9th edition and earlier editions. I can see why people like 8th/9th, and a large part of it stems from the desire to have it such that "you can take any units / army composition you want and have a chance at victory." It's letting people customize their army however they want with the promise that, "in theory" you can have a pathway to victory. Yes, 100 lasguns will eventually wound a titan, etc.

The problem of course is that in any sort of competitive or even lightly-competitive play (aka any time you agree to "matched play") there is a tendency to optimize your list around the most effective units. And since everything can wound everything, the incentive is to take as many of your best units as you can - hence the adoption of rule of 3. So now you take 3 of the strongest units and then 3 of the next strongest, etc. So while "in theory" you can take whatever you want and theoretically have a way to still damage your opponent, in practice that isn't what people are doing. People are tuning their list around the strongest units - as they have always done.

Which begs the question of what the heck is even the point of allowing ultimate freedom in list designing and allowing everything to potentially wound everything else, when the game isn't even remotely balanced enough to achieve that. And perhaps worst of all - what if it actually was balanced to achieve that? Would the game be even more of a pure luck dice fest?

I greatly prefer the older editions where there were possibilities for hard counters or situations where unit X just can't damage unit Y. Those mechanics required diversifying your list and accounting for a range of potential threats - or even more importantly utilize some out of the box thinking to mitigate the problem. I had a recent game (using ProHammer) where I had a land raider that my opponent couldn't actually wound (he was playing guard and didn't have anything stronger than S7 weapons). What did he do? He waited for my land raider to advance and used a few cheap Taurox's to road-block the land raider against a terrain piece. It tied the land raider up for a couple turns and neutralized where it was trying to drive to, forced the units to disembark early and made them susceptible to fire. It was pretty epic and well played.

Or take a much simpler route and give rectangular base for all vehicles that have armor facing values.

Then use line laser pointer and check if you have LOS to a certain side you're trying to hit.

Vehicle that don't have a reinforced front armor may not have a separate 'front armor' value - maybe you can make it so that only some of the vehicles have a 'front armor' and call what we're accustomed to calling a 'side armor' as 'hull armor' that serves as the general armor value, then have a "weak point" i.e. 'back armor' to suggest vulnerability on the vehicle, say the engine parts.

The problem with units being inmune to certain weapons isn't Land Raiders, because no list is entirely made of Land Raiders, but lists like Imperial Knights or 12 Leman Russes.

It is one of the issues that comes from 40k having scaled way beyond the original squad level

CadianSgtBob wrote:
It's a pretty much everything but Eldar and their AV12-only problem. Tau can take four Hammerheads and three Sky Rays, orks have three each of three different Battlewagons, Tyranids have a ton of different heavy support monsters. Are all those units good currently? Of course not. But if they ever are and you want a skew list there are a lot of options for taking nothing but tanks and making Ro3 irrelevant.

Hmm. Fair. Guess I lost track of how some of the non-eldar datasheets were being split up these days.

Obviously this is all hypothetical and I'm not really familiar with the exact list of units that is acceptable for the theme, but IMO a variant army list giving guardian jetbikes as troops at the expense of being able to take certain other units (and possibly other balancing factors) would probably be the best way to handle it. Or maybe each phoenix lord could take a no-slot command squad of their specific unit. But for most of the game the FOC is a pretty straightforward solution as-is.

I'm confident you could come up with something that would work reasonably well, but I'm not sure whatever we came up with would be better so much as it would just be different. But I think it's worth pointing out that in order to justify a change to vehicles, we're talking about having to overhaul the army composition rules including adding in a bunch of special rules to modify those revised army creation rules. Which seems like a lot of bending over backwards to justify the initial change.

I don't consider the FOC to be better than what we have now, but it was... okay. Flawed, but okay. You could basically do the Rites of Battle thing to adjust the army composition rules for a given army theme. So if you choose a "Wild Riders" theme for your army, then you have the option to field guardian bikers as troops provided that only 1 in 3 bikes (at most) has a heavy weapon. And then you could adjust the number of FA slots or something. So then the trick is just to create Rites of Battle rules for every conceivable army theme.

This has been discussed in depth in threads dedicated to the topic, but basically, what you're describing doesn't really work.

It hasn't worked but that doesn't mean it can't work. Yes, some factions have troops that are equivalent to the elites in other factions but they should still be the basic infantry relative to their own faction. And those factions should pay an appropriate price for the scoring buff on their upgraded troops. Or maybe you do a bit of re-balancing to the units, simplifying the elite troops a bit and giving other units in the codex some better tools to compensate.

I am skeptical. Feels like you're hand waiving the issue by saying, "All you have to do is perfect the internal and external balance of every codex, and then my idea is fine." And sure. If you do that first, then mandatory troop taxes are fine provided you also let people redefine what units can be taken as troops based on their army theme. But at that point, if troops are as good as non-troops and non-troops can be made into troops with the right HQ or Rite of Battle or whatever, then why bother having mandatory troops in the first place? Like, if you've theoretically balanced guardians against dire avengers against swooping hawks, then why force me to take guardians before I'm allowed to take the other two? If the goal is to reduce my ability to take tanks, then why restrict what non-tanks I'm allowed to field?

(And TBH gold marines should just be removed from the game. As a concept they're broken and putting them into the game required some major retcons that took away too much of what made them interesting.)

Largely agree. Custodes should have been Imperial Agents that you could take a single unit of; maybe even a single model.

If 95% of your opponent's army is a wall of AV11+ then you put troops on objectives and automatically win because those AV11+ boxes can't score anything.

That's basically just the excuse people give for imperial knights though, right? They'll say it doesn't matter that your army can't hurt them because you win the game by standing on objectives and accepting your beating. You can win the match, sure, but you're not really getting the core engagement of "our dudes attack each other."

That's true, but the eldar-specific woes were meant to illustrate the broader point that encouraging a parking lot meta means that you punish people for taking non-anti-tank options. If you can take a flamer or a meltagun, you'll always take the meltagun and leave the flamer at home. If you're an eldar player, you'll leave the striking scorpions and banshees on the shelf because you need more dragons to pop tanks. If you're a 'cron player, you'll just mentally edit tesla carbines out of your 'dex because you'll need gauss to glance tanks to death.

But that's only if you allow the extreme skew lists. If heavy support, where your actual tanks are taken, is capped at three models period and you need basic infantry to score objectives then you absolutely need those other options. Every list will have lots of infantry targets (or auto-lose), and even the vehicle-heavy lists will have primarily AV10-11 targets where your mid-strength weapons are relevant.

Depends on your definition of "extreme" skew, I suppose. I remember this exact problem being a thing in 5th edition against marine and IG lists. Again, it was a bit worse for eldar than most because our anti-tank tended to be concentrated into specific units rather than scattered around (ex: one melta gun hiding in a tac marine squad). What tended to happen was that I'd reliably kill my opponent's most powerful tanks, but then my anti-tank units mostly gone halfway through the game. So by the end of the game, I just didn't have enough units that could kill tanks well enough to get through the parking lot of razorbacks or chimeras and the troops inside them. Granted, this was partly due to 5th edition's vehicle damage chart and glancing rules. Things died perfectly quickly in 6th(?) when everything had hull points because eldar could spam enough S6 to blast transports off the table. But no one seemed to like that very much.

The problem with one-dimensional weapon choices is in the exact opposite situation: with the removal of AV you effectively combine anti-tank weapons with anti-MEQ weapons and take plasma guns on everything. High volume of fire mid-strength weapons are the ideal tool for pretty much everything. Melta is irrelevant because plasma does the same damage but divided over two shots for better anti-MEQ, vanquisher cannons are just battle cannons but worse, railguns didn't become relevant until GW added mortal wounds to kill multiple infantry models with one shot, Manticores went from being a specialist anti-tank weapon that sucked against marines to a generalist "kill every target type" balance mistake, etc. With the AV mechanic restored you regain the design space to have mid-strength marine killers that aren't great against vehicles and high-strength tank killers with AP 4 or worse so they don't effortlessly kill elite infantry.

I think the simpler solution here is to just up the wounds on vehicles and the damage on anti-tank guns; which is what GW seems to be doing with the recent books. D2 plasma is great for killing marines and okay at chipping away at vehicle health, but it's not as good at hurting vehicles as a Dd6+2 lascannon. And if vehicles all went up in wounds by, say, 25%, you probably wouldn't want to rely on D2 alone.

But I don't really see the value here. The lists that will struggle with a FOC-limited game with AV, deliberately stupid lists with no anti-tank threats in a game with tanks, will still auto-lose in standard 9th edition games. Does it really matter if a comedy Tau list with no ranged weapons can theoretically plink away a couple of wounds before getting tabled 100-0? Or a list with nothing but conscripts and lasguns? At some point you just have to say no, that's not a competently built list and I don't care if the person playing it feels bad before they lose.

I feel like you're going a bit hyperbolic here. I'm not talking about lists with literally zero anti-tank in them; I'm talking about lists that have slightly less anti-tank than they would typically need for a well-rounded enemy list. And if they have less than they'd need against a well-rounded list, they have way less than they'd needed for a parking lot. And then their opponent will likely prioritize killing what anti-tank threats the thematic list has meaning that the skew list will spend most of the game being essentially invulnerable.

Don't think all kroot all the time. Think a bunch of kroot but with a couple squads of crisis suits and hammerheads for support.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Mezmorki wrote:
'This discussion highlights the difference in philosophy between 8th/9th edition and earlier editions. I can see why people like 8th/9th, and a large part of it stems from the desire to have it such that "you can take any units / army composition you want and have a chance at victory."
...
Which begs the question of what the heck is even the point of allowing ultimate freedom in list designing and allowing everything to potentially wound everything else, when the game isn't even remotely balanced enough to achieve that.

Yeah. This is sort of the heart of the skew problem. Basically, the game doesn't have any guard rails preventing you from fielding really strong or really weak lists, nor does it do anything to take matchups into account. For instance, it doesn't account for the disadvantage a horde army has when facing an opponent that has loaded up on high rate of fire and blast weapons.

Conceptually, it might be useful to have some sort of formula for measuring the overall power/synergy of your list as well as how skewed your offensive and defensive stats are against various types of opponents. So you might be restricted on how hard you could skew into a horde or parking lot lists. And then if the formula spotted a bad matchup, you could give the underdog some sort of advantage to hopefully balance things out. That's probably an unrealistic ask though.

Wyldhunt wrote:
And then you could adjust the number of FA slots or something. So then the trick is just to create Rites of Battle rules for every conceivable army theme.

I doubt it. Most themes will either work fine within the FOC or be edge case concepts that don't really need official support. I suspect that once you start writing lists by reference to the actual fluff, not commitments to previous lists and their specific units, there would only be a fairly small number of iconic list themes that would need additional support.

Like, if you've theoretically balanced guardians against dire avengers against swooping hawks, then why force me to take guardians before I'm allowed to take the other two?

Because the goal is to ensure that every list has a substantial percentage of its points (at least 25-50%) invested in straightforward and relatively basic infantry. Balance issues are a lot easier to deal with if 50% of your army needs to be basic tactical marines with no special rules attached vs. the current situation where you can ignore them and only spam the overpowered skew thing. When a balance issue does come up there's an inherent limit to how much of the game it can be and the focus of the game will always be on the simplest and easiest to balance units.

That's basically just the excuse people give for imperial knights though, right? They'll say it doesn't matter that your army can't hurt them because you win the game by standing on objectives and accepting your beating. You can win the match, sure, but you're not really getting the core engagement of "our dudes attack each other."

People make it but it's stupid in 9th. Knights have access to obsec and even before they got it they could still score objectives. It was more of a defense by knight apologists than a realistic strategy for beating them. But what I'm talking about isn't just removing obsec, it's removing the ability to score objectives at all. That's a very different scenario and genuinely does become "you can never win a game with this list".

I think the simpler solution here is to just up the wounds on vehicles and the damage on anti-tank guns; which is what GW seems to be doing with the recent books. D2 plasma is great for killing marines and okay at chipping away at vehicle health, but it's not as good at hurting vehicles as a Dd6+2 lascannon. And if vehicles all went up in wounds by, say, 25%, you probably wouldn't want to rely on D2 alone.

This is a partial solution, but I don't see how it's any better than AV. If you implement it thoroughly enough to remove the plasma issue you risk creating the same scenario as AV, where everything but a short list of anti-tank weapons is completely ineffective at killing tank skew. Yeah, you'll have the psychological comfort of being able to at least pretend to roll dice but that doesn't have much practical value. Contrast this with the AV system, where you can have S6 anti-elite weapons that can't hurt tanks and AP4 anti-tank weapons that always allow the 2+/3+ armor saves on elites. There's an inherent block on those weapons overlapping so that even if GW makes the anti-elite weapon too cheap or gives it too many shots spamming it doesn't become an effective anti-everything tool..

Don't think all kroot all the time. Think a bunch of kroot but with a couple squads of crisis suits and hammerheads for support.

Then I don't really see the problem. A couple squads of crisis suits and multiple Hammerheads is quite a few anti-tank weapons. Maybe, because you went light on anti-tank, you reach a point in the game where you run out of anti-tank weapons before your opponent runs out of tanks but that's way short of "I can't even interact with 95% of that list". And I don't see a problem with "how much anti-tank do I bring" being a strategic decision, not something you're guaranteed to have every game no matter what you choose. Sometimes you just brought the wrong list for the meta and you have an uphill climb to win.

CadianSgtBob wrote:

Wyldhunt wrote:
And then you could adjust the number of FA slots or something. So then the trick is just to create Rites of Battle rules for every conceivable army theme.

I doubt it. Most themes will either work fine within the FOC or be edge case concepts that don't really need official support. I suspect that once you start writing lists by reference to the actual fluff, not commitments to previous lists and their specific units, there would only be a fairly small number of iconic list themes that would need additional support.

Off the top of my head... Saim-Hann wants bike troops. Iyanden wants wraith troops. Iybraesil wants banshee troops. Raven Wing wants bike troops. Death Wing wants terminator troops. White Scars want bike troops. Death Company wants Death Company troops. First company of any chapter wants terminator troops. Tank company wants tank troops. EC want noise marine troops. Night Lords might want raptor troops? (I don't know NL super well). And reasonable people probably have their own homebrew forces where unit X makes up the bulk of their force to the exclusion of conventional troops as well.

Like, if you've theoretically balanced guardians against dire avengers against swooping hawks, then why force me to take guardians before I'm allowed to take the other two?

Because the goal is to ensure that every list has a substantial percentage of its points (at least 25-50%) invested in straightforward and relatively basic infantry. Balance issues are a lot easier to deal with if 50% of your army needs to be basic tactical marines with no special rules attached vs. the current situation where you can ignore them and only spam the overpowered skew thing. When a balance issue does come up there's an inherent limit to how much of the game it can be and the focus of the game will always be on the simplest and easiest to balance units.

Ah. We may have to agree to disagree here. I'm strongly against the view that 50% of an army should be the same handful of units over and over again. It's mechanically punishing for some factions and narratively inappropriate for others. But again, I'd be willing to re-examine the issue once you've solved all internal and external troop-related balance issues.

That's basically just the excuse people give for imperial knights though, right? They'll say it doesn't matter that your army can't hurt them because you win the game by standing on objectives and accepting your beating. You can win the match, sure, but you're not really getting the core engagement of "our dudes attack each other."

People make it but it's stupid in 9th. Knights have access to obsec and even before they got it they could still score objectives. It was more of a defense by knight apologists than a realistic strategy for beating them. But what I'm talking about isn't just removing obsec, it's removing the ability to score objectives at all. That's a very different scenario and genuinely does become "you can never win a game with this list".

I still maintain that only being able to score with troops was terrible in 5th edition and would be terrible if reintroduced. But again, I guess the issue of some troops being inherently worse and/or worse at scoring than others might go away once you've solved all internal and external unit balance issues in the game. Think you can knock those balance changes out by Monday? (I tease.)

I think the simpler solution here is to just up the wounds on vehicles and the damage on anti-tank guns; which is what GW seems to be doing with the recent books. D2 plasma is great for killing marines and okay at chipping away at vehicle health, but it's not as good at hurting vehicles as a Dd6+2 lascannon. And if vehicles all went up in wounds by, say, 25%, you probably wouldn't want to rely on D2 alone.

This is a partial solution, but I don't see how it's any better than AV. If you implement it thoroughly enough to remove the plasma issue you risk creating the same scenario as AV, where everything but a short list of anti-tank weapons is completely ineffective at killing tank skew. Yeah, you'll have the psychological comfort of being able to at least pretend to roll dice but that doesn't have much practical value. Contrast this with the AV system, where you can have S6 anti-elite weapons that can't hurt tanks and AP4 anti-tank weapons that always allow the 2+/3+ armor saves on elites. There's an inherent block on those weapons overlapping so that even if GW makes the anti-elite weapon too cheap or gives it too many shots spamming it doesn't become an effective anti-everything tool..

If we're only talking about raising vehicle wounds by about 25%, then I don't think we fall into the trap you're describing. Currently, S4 attacks are able to meaningfully contribute against something like a rhino without being an efficient way to completely take it out. Giving the rhino an extra 2 or 3 wounds probably doesn't change that, but it does make the rhino a smidge more durable against anti-tank guns.

Don't think all kroot all the time. Think a bunch of kroot but with a couple squads of crisis suits and hammerheads for support.

Then I don't really see the problem. A couple squads of crisis suits and multiple Hammerheads is quite a few anti-tank weapons. Maybe, because you went light on anti-tank, you reach a point in the game where you run out of anti-tank weapons before your opponent runs out of tanks but that's way short of "I can't even interact with 95% of that list".

Depends on when you reach that point. If the parking lot kills your hammerheads on turn 1 and your crisis suits on turn 2, then you've still got 3 out of 5 game rounds where the remaining parking lot is untouchable. And the kroot might never get to fire a shot if your hammerheads and crisis suits were prioritizing non-transport threats while they were alive.

And I don't see a problem with "how much anti-tank do I bring" being a strategic decision, not something you're guaranteed to have every game no matter what you choose. Sometimes you just brought the wrong list for the meta and you have an uphill climb to win.

The thing is that it's less of a strategic decision and more of a gamble. Do you take the amount of AT you'll need to deal with a conventional list, or do you play it safe and take ALL THE AT so that you can deal with a skew list? If you choose the form and face the latter, then you end up spending multiple hours having a bad matchup because you didn't play it safe. But playing it safe means the scenarios I've describe above where you leave the flamers and the scorpions at home in favor of meltaguns and fire dragons.

Though tbf, you can also just opt to not play against skew lists. Which is maybe the best/easiest solution.

 Mezmorki wrote:


The problem of course is that in any sort of competitive or even lightly-competitive play (aka any time you agree to "matched play") there is a tendency to optimize your list around the most effective units. And since everything can wound everything, the incentive is to take as many of your best units as you can - hence the adoption of rule of 3. So now you take 3 of the strongest units and then 3 of the next strongest, etc. So while "in theory" you can take whatever you want and theoretically have a way to still damage your opponent, in practice that isn't what people are doing. People are tuning their list around the strongest units - as they have always done.

Which begs the question of what the heck is even the point of allowing ultimate freedom in list designing and allowing everything to potentially wound everything else, when the game isn't even remotely balanced enough to achieve that. And perhaps worst of all - what if it actually was balanced to achieve that? Would the game be even more of a pure luck dice fest?

I don't really agree. It's in 3rd-7th that people spammed the best units and then the next strongest. There was a FOC but ultimately it could have been bypassed by fielding multiple CADs, and updates were not very frequent so people were encouraged to chase the best builds of the moment. Now the freedom is only in theory since with not many CPs available from start slots are kinda precious. Furthemore, there's much more internal balance now than what we had in the past, when in tournaments each faction had 10ish competitive units and that's it.

Everything potentially wounding everything is a false problem, in practise if you face a skew list with lots of tanks and you don't have the anti tank sure you could strip some wounds here and there, maybe even killing a tank, but at the end of the game the opponent would have the majority of his force intact anyway. And everything potentially wounding everything is countered by the fact that armoured stuff is now much harder to kill: in 3rd-7th I used to lose vehicles to a single hit everytime, even AV14 tanks. AV10 trukks always instant killed by single shot from a heavy bolter, assault cannon or scatter laser. A single melta hit had a guaranteed kill or make useless one of my ork vehicles. On the other hand a single pk dude was enough to kill the vast majority of the tanks in the game. Now all of thise scenarios are flat out impossible.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 skchsan wrote:
Or take a much simpler route and give rectangular base for all vehicles that have armor facing values.

It's the only way to make armor facings reasonable and clean. But aesthetically many players wouldn't be ok with that, and lots of vehicles already have round/oval base so having to re-base those would be an additional issue.

 Blackie wrote:

 skchsan wrote:
Or take a much simpler route and give rectangular base for all vehicles that have armor facing values.

It's the only way to make armor facings reasonable and clean. But aesthetically many players wouldn't be ok with that, and lots of vehicles already have round/oval base so having to re-base those would be an additional issue.

Or give every vehicle a base of whatever shape they prefer and put notches on it. The game really does need base on every unit IMHO.

Earlier in the thread someone asked "why stop at vehicles, space Marines could have facings too since their armor is weaker from behind."
This is true for all practically made (ie. not Necron) armor, but the point of vehicle facing and flanking is that vehicles like tanks turn slowly and have limited peripheral vision. Even a Carnifex could whip around quickly to cover its arse.
Getting a backstab in on infantry, space Marines, etc is just represented by getting through the saving throw.
However, walkers are a different case. I know from MechWarrior that anything like a Titan is very susceptible to facings. But Sentinels are more like AT-ST's from Star Wars and I don't think anyone bothered flanking those. And Tau battlesuits are like Gundams that can do cartwheels and play limbo, so even though they have exposed rear armor aren't they maneuverable enough to cover it?

I also want to say that I like the idea of just identifying "weak points" like the rear armor of the vehicle and not bothering with side armor. If you draw a T on the vehicle and you shoot from behind the rear line, it counts as higher AP or strength or something. Symmetrical vehicles like the Necron pyramid thing wouldn't have a weak point.

Oh, and I play a house rule that gives double Strength vs Toughness an advantage or disadvantage. When Strength 3 tries to wound Toughness 6, it rolls with disadvantage, re-rolling successful hit rolls so only double sixes make it though.
Likewise S6 vs T3 rerolls failed wound rolls. This helps lessen the lasgun vs titan thing. I've considered pushing the threshold to triple though, so S3 vs T9 would have to roll with disadvantage.

 kingpbjames wrote:
Even a Carnifex could whip around quickly to cover its arse.

A Carnifex sure, but the larger monsters (Exocrine, Maleceptor, Tyrannofex, Harpy, FW stuff, etc) are unlikely to be able to quickly whip around to cover their arse.

 Tyran wrote:

A Carnifex sure, but the larger monsters (Exocrine, Maleceptor, Tyrannofex, Harpy, FW stuff, etc) are unlikely to be able to quickly whip around to cover their arse.

I forgot to mention those. I was going to point out that they're in a sort of grey area too, but now that I think about it, any sort of giant monster is a lot less static than a tank. I would draw the line between mechanical giants that are mostly static and organic giants that are mostly moving. Let's lump demon engines in with the monsters since once you think you've got a clear shot at it's rear armor it will probably grow a face there and stick its tongue out at you. Or maybe not.

kingpbjames wrote:

 Tyran wrote:

A Carnifex sure, but the larger monsters (Exocrine, Maleceptor, Tyrannofex, Harpy, FW stuff, etc) are unlikely to be able to quickly whip around to cover their arse.

I forgot to mention those. I was going to point out that they're in a sort of grey area too, but now that I think about it, any sort of giant monster is a lot less static than a tank. I would draw the line between mechanical giants that are mostly static and organic giants that are mostly moving. Let's lump demon engines in with the monsters since once you think you've got a clear shot at it's rear armor it will probably grow a face there and stick its tongue out at you. Or maybe not.

Honestly, I think it varies too much to really be clearly cut between monsters and vehicles. Exocrines look like they should be sluggish to respond like a tank. Penitent engines are controlled via brain jack and seem like they should be pretty nimble. Sentinels are described as being maneuverable enough to change their facing (and as walkers, it used to be that you counted as targeting their front armor in melee), but they also look vulnerable in the rear. Daemon princes should probably be perfectly nimble, but great unclean ones maybe shouldn't be. It's all over the place.

kingpbjames wrote:
Oh, and I play a house rule that gives double Strength vs Toughness an advantage or disadvantage. When Strength 3 tries to wound Toughness 6, it rolls with disadvantage, re-rolling successful hit rolls so only double sixes make it though.
Likewise S6 vs T3 rerolls failed wound rolls. This helps lessen the lasgun vs titan thing.

Do you not find attacking T6+ with S3 kind of pointless? If we're talking lasgun guardsmen, you'd normally need...
36 shots at BS4+ to get 18 hits to get 3 wounds to fail 1 3+ save to put a single wound on a rhino.
But with "disadvantage" on the to-wound roll, you'd need...
216 shots at BS4+ to get 108 hits with a 1/36th chance of wounding to get 3 wounds against a 3+ save to get 1 unsaved wound.

At 36 shots per 1 unsaved wound, the small arms fire is a pretty minor threat, but you might chip in enough damage against vehicles over the course of the game to matter. At 216 shots, you may as well save the time and not bother rolling. And that's with dirt cheap guardsmen. With sisters or kabalites or what have you shooting at something T8+ (even counting in their better BS), you're paying more points for each shot but still not getting enough wounds through for it to really matter.

Personally, I like that massed bolters and shurikens can contribute against tanks, but I'd rather give that damage up than have to roll 200 attacks to get a single point of damage through.

When you put it that way, 216 lasgun beams is a lot of las on one target...

On one hand, I like games with hard counters as said previously. I like investing in a tank to become immune to small arms fire so I can focus it on heavy targets and anti-tankers.
On the other hand I understand it's not a complaint against fielding a well rounded army but not every army has a fun way of handling armor-heavy lists.

I would like to see more anti-tank troop options, like high explosive grenades on basic infantry.

 kingpbjames wrote:

On one hand, I like games with hard counters as said previously. I like investing in a tank to become immune to small arms fire so I can focus it on heavy targets and anti-tankers.
On the other hand I understand it's not a complaint against fielding a well rounded army but not every army has a fun way of handling armor-heavy lists.

Yep. That's a perfectly reasonable way to feel. Lots of people have made solid arguments for making vehicles immune to small arms fire. Personally, I've had enough bad experiences with skew lists (or armies that are bad at anti-tank) to not be a fan. Currently, bolters can meaningfully contribute towards killing tanks but are bad enough at it that you really want to field a decent amount of AT. And that's where I like it. Your bolters aren't useless against a parking lot, but they're also not nearly good enough against tanks to be a replacement for meltaguns and lascannons. Everyone in the tactical marine or sororitas squad is pitching in against the enemy tank, but the meltagun is contributing a lot more.

I wonder if a return of facings and overall increase in vehicle durability could also be paired with making tanks easier to hit.

After all the same logic of tanks being sluggish also means they are easier to hit.

 Tyran wrote:
I wonder if a return of facings and overall increase in vehicle durability could also be paired with making tanks easier to hit.

After all the same logic of tanks being sluggish also means they are easier to hit.

That was sort of a thing back in the day; the number you needed to hit a tank in melee was based on how fast it had moved. It was something like:

Stationary = get hit automatically.
Combat/Cruising Speed = Get hit on a 4+.
Cruising speed and a skimmer = get hit on 6+.

^That's probably not quite right, but you get the idea.