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Partly an answer to Brother Haraldus' fluffy chaos thread, partly to the 'Marines survive stuff!' thread, and partly to the question of 'why aren't Riptides walkers?!', my solution... is to convert certain units.

Models with a special movement type such as Jump or Jetpack retain those movement styles in addition to the rules granted by the Vehicle (Walker) type.

Sororitas (and other Toughness 1-3 models) with a 3+ save become Type Vehicle (Walker)and replace their Toughness and Save values with an Armour of 10 all round, and their Wounds characteristic with a Hull Points characteristic of their Wounds +1. They have the Mortal Engine and Only Human special rules. They have an Armour Save against Glancing Hits of 5+. Their points value is increased by 12 points/model.

Astartes (and other Toughness 4-5 models) with a 3+ save become Type Vehicle (Walker) and replace their Toughness and Save values with Armour 10 all round and their Wounds characteristic with a Hull Points characteristic of their Wounds +1. They have the Mortal Engine special rule. They have an Armour Save against Glancing Hits of 4+. Their points value is increased by 16 points/model.

Riptides (and other Toughness 6-8 models) with a 3+ save become Type Vehicle (Walker) and replace their Toughness and Save values with an Armour of 11 all round and their Wounds characteristic with a Hull Points characteristic of their Wounds +1. They have the Mortal Engines special rule. They have an Armour Save against Glancing hits of 4+. Their points value is not increased.

Wraithknights (and other Toughness of 9+ models) with a 3+ save become Type Vehicle (Walker) and replace their Toughness and Save values with an Armour of 12 all round and their Wounds characteristic with a Hull Points characteristic of their Wounds +1. They have the Mortal Engines special rule. They have an Armour Save against Glancing hits of 4+. Their points value is not increased.

Inquisitors (and other Toughness 1-3 models) with a 2+ save become Type Vehicle (Walker)and replace their Toughness and Save values with an Armour of 11 all round, and their Wounds characteristic with a Hull Points characteristic of their Wounds +1. They have the Mortal Engine and Only Human special rules. They have an Armour Save against Glancing Hits of 4+. Their points value is increased by 14 points/model.

Terminators (and other Toughness 4-5 models) with a 2+ save become Type Vehicle (Walker)and replace their Toughness and Save values with an Armour of 11 all round, and their Wounds characteristic with a Hull Points characteristic of their Wounds +1. They have the Mortal Engine special rule. They have an Armour Save against Glancing Hits of 3+. Their points value is increased by 18 points/model.

Dreadknights (and other Toughness 6-8 models) with a 2+ save become Type Vehicle (Walker)and replace their Toughness and Save values with an Armour of 12 all round, and their Wounds characteristic with a Hull Points characteristic of their Wounds +1. They have the Mortal Engine and Only Human special rules. They have an Armour Save against Glancing Hits of 3+. Their points value is not increased.

Models with a Toughness of 9+ and a 2+ save become Type Vehicle (Walker) and replace their Toughness and Save values with an Armour of 13 all round and their Wounds characteristic with a Hull Points characteristic of their Wounds +1. They have the Mortal Engines special rule. They have an Armour Save against Glancing hits of 3+. Their points value is not increased.

New Special Rules
Mortal Engine: Models with this rule are more flesh than machine. When exploding, they only explode 1".
Only Human: Models with this rule are relatively fragile inside their armour, though they need not be literally human. Rolls on the Vehicle Damage Table against them are increased by +1.

Wraithknights are T8, not T9+

Otherwise I disagree. I think that they are fine as infantry. Besides, being walkers brings a lot of other things such as 100% fearlessness, inability to remove said Fearless even with psychic powers, and so on.

Too bad being a walker also means being glanced out by medium strength weapons trivially.

Hence the save against glancing hits that would otherwise completely paste the T4 marines.

What's better? Being glanced on a 4+ or being wounded on a 2+?

I think the biggest issue with this is that it turns an already-limited range of statistics into an even more limited one. Yes, the vehicle armour table is much more realistic than infantry armour (e.g. Space Marine dying to a grot punching him because he failed his Toughness and armour save), but this takes a range that goes to 10 and limits it to a range of 4.

I think that, for this system, you would want to introduce AVs that are less than 10, purely because it will be strange to convert basically everyone except for models with less than 3+ armour into Walkers (I know you're trying to go for power armour realism, but still). For example, a standard Ork Boy could be AV7. Lasguns would wound him on a 5+, as they currently do. Not sure about points costs, though.

How does Poison and Instant Death work with this system? Also, your "Mortal Engine" rule should do more. For example, Haywire shouldn't work, Poison should work (except for Necrons - but that immediately gives problems for Dark Eldar players vs Necrons), and there shouldn't be any exploding. Some value should be added for headshots. Perhaps rolls of a 6 gain one point of Strength?

All in all, I rather like this idea, if only for a fun thing to mess around with.

I did think about making Marines AV8 so that bolters would still wound on a 4+ (effectively), but they're still simply too fragile for how they're supposed to be portrayed in that case, effectively being glanced to death by lasguns.

Instant Death... I guess the only way to sensibly do it would be for Instant Death weapons to inflict double HP damage.

There's slightly more variance than just the 10-14 range, however - higher toughnesses provide better resilience against Glancing Hits through the additional save system.

Oh god no. You've just made anything in power armor immune to lasguns and virtually immune to bolters, made terminators effectively immune to all basic infantry weapons, and simultaneously made Riptides and similar units hilariously fragile (remember that even "shaken" on the damage chart prevents an ion riptide from shooting its main weapon). The solution to power armor "weakness" isn't to make whole armies of walkers that can ignore 90% of your weapons, it's for people to stop thinking that a 3+ armor save means god-like durability, and maybe a slight point decrease for certain power armor units.

So what's your solution, within the context of changing things to Walkers? Lower AV values for Power Armour? It is supposed to make you a 'walking tank'.

Or higher points adjustments? Just go ahead and assume that the point of suggestions is to make this idea work, and not to find reasons to throw it out completely.

That's....a LOT of change. In response to the issue that it's meant as a counter proposal for the "marines survive things" rule, that rule is literally a one liner that anyone could say "hey let's play with this rule" and you would never need to consult the rulebook for it. It's hilariously simple.

And then there's this thing... Figuring out vehicle damage on every man in a 10 man squad? If one gets immobilized, can the rest of the squad leave him? Do they get 4" coherency like other vehicle squads? Does a shaken/stunned guy stop the whole squad from moving? Do I have to measure range from their boltgun barrel now? Can I capture objectives at all? The whole squad is "relentless" due to being walkers right? And powerfists/thunderhammers now strike at initiative because walkers ignore unwieldy right? And all of them, even the walking marines, get hammer of wrath? Does the armor save on glancing hits get ignored if the weapon is high AP? Can my walkers get in transports? If not, what CAN I get in my transports? Can I still make feel no pain rolls? Aren't I now immune to instant death except for the instadeath rule itself? Are all my troops now fearless for being vehicles? Do I always count them as Ld10 for things like psychic tests? Are they immune to all the effects that can't effect vehicles? Are characters still characters?

You literally have to write a good page FAQ to implement this. That speaks volumes.

Also if you set them at AV 8, s3 guns effectively rend them, since they only get armor saves on glances. At AV 10 they are immune to s3, which in my thread I designed the rule to NOT CHANGE the status quo in the lower half of the strength values, because no one's really complaining about str 3-5. That's the part of the game that seems to work correctly.

And 2 hull points each...Oh god. Need to make a WHOLE TON of hull point markers and vehicle damage effect markers to sprinkle on the table. There's gonna be more of those things on the table than terrain!

Fun things:
Mephiston now has AV12 and 6 (!!!) hull points, a 3+ save on glancing hits, and no additional point cost. WOOOOO. Also most baddies with instant death weapons like force weapons and huskblades now can't touch him. I kinda like this one. Maybe I'll just start calling him the T-800 and saying "where is john connor" while he tears through squads that can't hurt him. Also he can now rip and tear through terminators again, thanks to them also being an AV value instead of having 2+ armor.

Sisters are now each 2 hull point...things that have 6+ invulns! The rage of trying to shoot down a seraphim squad with their re-roll invulns ought to be hilarious.

marines now cost 30 points each...for a walker with a bolter. And you have to take 2 squads of these, so minimum 300 points for two half-squads of compulsory troops. 600 if you want full squads to combat-squad and the like. There'll definitely be less marines on the table, for sure. Orks will now cry when they face you though, since you're immune to them in CC except on the turn they charge.

My BA assault marines are now 34 a model, and there's probably no point in taking a priest anymore, so 1700 gets me FIFTY AV10 jumppack walkers, completely nullifying any fleshbane, poison, or low str weapons/melee on my opponent's side. I think I'll add in Mephy for 250, and sprinkle some meltaguns on guys in the back of their squads, and call it a day.

Terminators with storm shields. AV11 vehicles with 3+ invulns! wooooo.

In all seriousness, yikes, this proposed rule is....crazy, to be frank.

So...the vast majority of Eldar, Imperial Guard, Tau, Dark Eldar, and non-charging Ork units officially become completely helpless in CC against anything in a Marine codex, and weapons like Lasguns and Fragmentation grenades likewise serve no purpose in such games?

This would also add a lot of record keeping. Imagine you hit a squad of SM's with a battlecannon, say 6 hits, you then have to roll 2d6-pick-highest-ordnance armor pen for each one, roll saves, track damage individually, what do you do with an immobilized or stunned Space Marine?

This would also make S6/7 multi-shot weapons king of the game, much moreso than heavier (but slower firing) guns.

 Furyou Miko wrote:
So what's your solution, within the context of changing things to Walkers? Lower AV values for Power Armour? It is supposed to make you a 'walking tank'.

Effectively it already does that. A 3+sv unit is drastically more survivable than common infantry, who's armor can potentially withstand hits from common medium anti-tank weapons and still keep them alive and in the fight. But it doesn't mean invincible, it doesn't mean they're as tough as an *actual* tank by any means, it doesn't mean completely immune to small arms fire.

There's nothing wrong with MEQ units' survivability right now. The problem is that the changes to some cover, vehicle, and transport rules have made it too difficult for them to get to grips with their enemies in many circumstances against certain foes, but that's not unique to MEQ's by any means, they just happen to be the most popular unit type with that issue.

 Furyou Miko wrote:
So what's your solution, within the context of changing things to Walkers?

Don't. It's a fundamentally broken concept because infantry aren't supposed to use vehicle rules. Either you have marines that are nearly invulnerable to basic infantry guns (and completely immune to lasguns), or you have weird things like AV 7 tactical marines and AV 16 Riptides.

 Peregrine wrote:
Oh god no. You've just made anything in power armor immune to lasguns and virtually immune to bolters, made terminators effectively immune to all basic infantry weapons, and simultaneously made Riptides and similar units hilariously fragile (remember that even "shaken" on the damage chart prevents an ion riptide from shooting its main weapon). The solution to power armor "weakness" isn't to make whole armies of walkers that can ignore 90% of your weapons, it's for people to stop thinking that a 3+ armor save means god-like durability, and maybe a slight point decrease for certain power armor units.

100% with this. I'd rather not play games where my basic infantry gets to do nothing except die. Quite literally, nothing except die. I run foot blobs with Armoured support. I know it isn't too competitive, but seriously? I'd rather face Movie marines. At least I have a chance of killing them.

I don't believe this would work very well. I agree that power-armoured troops need 'something', I just don't think that something should be a lot of the proposed rules i've seen recently. I argued quite vehemently against the idea of the "Marines Survive Stuff" thread and I would do the same in this case. A simple solution would be the best, and this is very complex. Remember - GW needs to sell Marines to new players who have no concept of the game. Complications like this would really hamper the plug 'n' play nature of Marines, IMO. A interesting case, though.

... Power Armor is presented, in the fluff, as providing near-invulnerability to small arms. Terminator/TDA even more so, all but literally turning the wearer into a walking tank. PA *should* render you immune to lasguns, autoguns, and other "basic" ballistic weapons, excepting on a 6+ for those lucky shots that catch you in the eye-piece.

^ That. It is basically the point of PA, even if PA gets less and less effective as you introduce bigger and bigger guns.

It would hardly be balanced though.

 Psienesis wrote:
... Power Armor is presented, in the fluff, as providing near-invulnerability to small arms. Terminator/TDA even more so, all but literally turning the wearer into a walking tank. PA *should* render you immune to lasguns, autoguns, and other "basic" ballistic weapons, excepting on a 6+ for those lucky shots that catch you in the eye-piece.

Only if you consider the marine fanboy fluff to be objective truth. The problem with doing that is everyone else also has their fluff about how everything they have is awesome and unbeatable. So you can have power armor that is immune to lasguns, but then you also have Eldar that move so fast that marines only hit them on a 6+ (and re-roll hits if the Eldar model is a character), Tau railguns that auto-explode every tank on a 72" line, IG armies that bring a thousand guardsmen in a 500 point game (and can automatically respawn any guardsmen that die), etc. The only way to avoid that kind of absurd "game" is to understand that large parts of the fluff are biased in favor of whoever the main characters of the story are, and throw out the worst examples of how powerful each side is. And when you do that you get something like what we have now: power armor is good protection and marines are good elite infantry, but they still die.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Psienesis wrote:
... Power Armor is presented, in the fluff, as providing near-invulnerability to small arms. Terminator/TDA even more so, all but literally turning the wearer into a walking tank. PA *should* render you immune to lasguns, autoguns, and other "basic" ballistic weapons, excepting on a 6+ for those lucky shots that catch you in the eye-piece.

Only if you consider the marine fanboy fluff to be objective truth. The problem with doing that is everyone else also has their fluff about how everything they have is awesome and unbeatable. So you can have power armor that is immune to lasguns, but then you also have Eldar that move so fast that marines only hit them on a 6+ (and re-roll hits if the Eldar model is a character), Tau railguns that auto-explode every tank on a 72" line, IG armies that bring a thousand guardsmen in a 500 point game (and can automatically respawn any guardsmen that die), etc. The only way to avoid that kind of absurd "game" is to understand that large parts of the fluff are biased in favor of whoever the main characters of the story are, and throw out the worst examples of how powerful each side is. And when you do that you get something like what we have now: power armor is good protection and marines are good elite infantry, but they still die.

Yeah, everyone understands your opinion now. But no matter how much you want it to be and try to make it seem like it is, it is not anywhere near an objective truth.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Psienesis wrote:
... Power Armor is presented, in the fluff, as providing near-invulnerability to small arms. Terminator/TDA even more so, all but literally turning the wearer into a walking tank. PA *should* render you immune to lasguns, autoguns, and other "basic" ballistic weapons, excepting on a 6+ for those lucky shots that catch you in the eye-piece.

Only if you consider the marine fanboy fluff to be objective truth. The problem with doing that is everyone else also has their fluff about how everything they have is awesome and unbeatable. So you can have power armor that is immune to lasguns, but then you also have Eldar that move so fast that marines only hit them on a 6+ (and re-roll hits if the Eldar model is a character), Tau railguns that auto-explode every tank on a 72" line, IG armies that bring a thousand guardsmen in a 500 point game (and can automatically respawn any guardsmen that die), etc. The only way to avoid that kind of absurd "game" is to understand that large parts of the fluff are biased in favor of whoever the main characters of the story are, and throw out the worst examples of how powerful each side is. And when you do that you get something like what we have now: power armor is good protection and marines are good elite infantry, but they still die.

The die too much from too far away against Xeno lists. That's the whole point. And the culprits are NOT low AP weapons. They are cheap, high ROF, mid S weapons.

 BrotherHaraldus wrote:

 Peregrine wrote:

 Psienesis wrote:
... Power Armor is presented, in the fluff, as providing near-invulnerability to small arms. Terminator/TDA even more so, all but literally turning the wearer into a walking tank. PA *should* render you immune to lasguns, autoguns, and other "basic" ballistic weapons, excepting on a 6+ for those lucky shots that catch you in the eye-piece.

Only if you consider the marine fanboy fluff to be objective truth. The problem with doing that is everyone else also has their fluff about how everything they have is awesome and unbeatable. So you can have power armor that is immune to lasguns, but then you also have Eldar that move so fast that marines only hit them on a 6+ (and re-roll hits if the Eldar model is a character), Tau railguns that auto-explode every tank on a 72" line, IG armies that bring a thousand guardsmen in a 500 point game (and can automatically respawn any guardsmen that die), etc. The only way to avoid that kind of absurd "game" is to understand that large parts of the fluff are biased in favor of whoever the main characters of the story are, and throw out the worst examples of how powerful each side is. And when you do that you get something like what we have now: power armor is good protection and marines are good elite infantry, but they still die.

Yeah, everyone understands your opinion now. But no matter how much you want it to be and try to make it seem like it is, it is not anywhere near an objective truth.

Only, it is an objective truth. BL does it, so do the codexes. So, actually, the fact that marine fanboy fluff isn't objective truth is... well, an objective truth in itself.

I never said that.

I said that Peregrine's opinion isn't an objective truth, even if he implies otherwise by being judgemental and snide.

Calling someone fanboy is simply not going to help at all, in any situation.

Not saying those who are called fanboys are always right. But what they say should be judged for what it is, instead of being dismissed with a condescending label.

 BrotherHaraldus wrote:
I never said that.

I said that Peregrine's opinion isn't an objective truth, even if he implies otherwise by being judgemental and snide.

Calling someone fanboy is simply not going to help at all, in any situation.

Not saying those who are called fanboys are always right. But what they say should be judged for what it is, instead of being dismissed with a condescending label.

Not going to get involved with the fanboy aspect. Not my fight. But it wasn't simply an opinion. It was (at least in part, and the part that matters) an objective truth. Codexes swing all over the place with consistency. That's the objective truth, and it means Peregrine's right about everyone having their own fluff and so on. Regardless of unaimed fanboy comments, but again, not getting into that.

I'm hardly a fan boy. I actually dislike the marines. But it's the army that own.

Know what the wonderful thing about proposed homebrew rules is?

If you don't like them, you can not use them.

Saying "This is a stupid idea, don't use it" is not conducive to discussion. Just don't reply to a thread if that's the only opinion you have.

If you have a suggestion to change the rule for the better - to better represent the sheer unstoppable power that power armour and terminator armour are supposed to represent, or to rebalance the 'monstrous creatures that should be vehicles' - then please, feel free to comment. Otherwise, to use the common vernacular, pike off.

Nobody is twisting your arm to join in with the thread. Stop pretending I'm trying to force you to use my rules just so you can deride them.

Way I see it, either make Power Armour nigh on invincible to small arms and die like bitches to big guns, or lower AP across the board so they get their saves more often, or simply take those big guns out of the game.

Quite frankly seeing an elite squad of Astartes get blasted by some jerkass tank and 2+ off of the board just ruins the immersion for me.

That's better than getting pecked to death by 50+ Eldar wounds a turn that you get saves against.

Actually, a tank is more than sufficient armament to take out Space Marines, IMO. Note that I said that PA made you almost immune to small arms.... a tank's cannon is decidedly *not* a small arm.

The same could be said for the heavy bolter or equivalent weapon. These are weapons dedicated to taking out fellow Marines and bigger targets. Las-cannons and meltas, too, being anti-armor weapons, should pop PA fairly easily.

What shouldn't be popping PA is lasguns, autoguns, pistols, non-powered/non-mono/non-chain melee weapons, and similar weapons. Want to throw a standard frag grenade at a pack of Space Marines? You're just going to piss them off. Melta-bomb or krak grenade? Now you're talking.

Pulse Rifles, Gauss, Shuriken weapons, etc? This should be somewhere in the "might do it, might not" area. While these weapons should be superior to the standard lasgun, they should not be insta-gibbing to Space Marines (or any PA or PA-equivalent troop). While they should have some capability of armor piercing attacks, there needs to be some credit given to the fact that the Space Marines *did* conquer a healthy section of the galaxy in power armor and bolters, and that a lot of their enemies (none, in fact) have had the opportunity or the means to rapidly ramp up arms production to find the cure to Power Armor. The Tau should have a slight edge, being that they are all techy, the Necrons for being super-scienced out their metal wazoos, and the Eldar for being all high-magi-tech and shooting monomolecular shards in a stream at them.

But, in the end, against such foes, PA soldiers (SM and all of its variants, FW, SOB, MANz, etc.) should be getting 3+ to 4+ base saves, to a minimum of 2+ with the top-end of PA, and TDA maybe 3++ (because 2++ is just a Thing That Should Not Be.).