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 some bloke wrote:

I agree that having high wounds and save on vehicles, whilst also making them immune to small arms, would probably be too much.

Perhaps an overhaul of the wounds characteristics of all the vehicles would be in order. Bear in mind, though, that the main anti-tank weapons of this edition are all D6 damage, so if we assume an average roll of 3.5 and remember when vehicles had 3HP, we get 10-11 wounds. 12 would be a good basis, I think, as it is the boundary for being 2-shotted by a lascannon. light vehicles must have below 12 wounds, heavy vehicles should have over 12 wounds.

Well, at that point we're talking about a complete overhaul of both vehicle statlines and the rules used to harm them, so it's hard to discuss without seeing specifics. That said, if you want to make vehicles immune to small arms fire, you have to ask if and how that makes the game better. Because you're basically saying, "Any points you spent on Strength X or lower aren't allowed to interact with vehicles using the core gameplay (attacking stuff)."

I'm receptive to the idea that tanks should be immune to bolters and shuriken weapons. But I've spent a lot of time as the guy whose collection features a lot of small arms and not a lot of tanks. Tell me why making my opponent's parking lot immune to huge chunks of my collection is good for the game and more fun for both of us.

Wyldhunt wrote:
[Tell me why making my opponent's parking lot immune to huge chunks of my collection is good for the game and more fun for both of us.

This is the heart of it.

It's not good for the game to have a whole series of things be immune to the other series of things. It creates an artificial barrier to entry where anything less than x is worthless.

 Lance845 wrote:
It's not good for the game to have a whole series of things be immune to the other series of things. It creates an artificial barrier to entry where anything less than x is worthless.

Strongly disagree. It's great for the game to have immunity to certain weapons because it forces you to make difficult strategic decisions. If everything can wound everything then it encourages mindlessly lining up your dice against my dice and rolling to see who wins. But if your only anti-tank weapons are your heavy weapon squads (which, btw, can no longer move and shoot) you have to pay close attention to how you deploy and use them, and failure to do so means losing the game. It also means that you have to pay attention to the metagame and understand which weapons you need to bring to make a TAC list instead of spamming plasma because it's best against everything.

Which would be all good and fine if a parking lot wasn't even possible. If the game was structured in such a way that TAC was the only way to build. But it's not. And as long as it's not, a hand full of anti tank squads will be targeted first so the now immune vehicles can steam roll over everything else that can't stop them.

Plasma being best against everything is it's own problem and has nothing to do with this. People being upset that bolters and lasguns CAN hurt a tank are ignoring how inefficient it is for bolter to be used to hurt a tank. But possible is significantly better then not possible.

 Peregrine wrote:

 Lance845 wrote:
It's not good for the game to have a whole series of things be immune to the other series of things. It creates an artificial barrier to entry where anything less than x is worthless.

Strongly disagree. It's great for the game to have immunity to certain weapons because it forces you to make difficult strategic decisions. If everything can wound everything then it encourages mindlessly lining up your dice against my dice and rolling to see who wins. But if your only anti-tank weapons are your heavy weapon squads (which, btw, can no longer move and shoot) you have to pay close attention to how you deploy and use them, and failure to do so means losing the game.

The key thing that you're not mentioning here is that different weapons/tactics can have different levels of efficiency against various types of targets without making some targets straight up immune to a large number of the weapons in the game. My shuriken catapults are not an efficient way to kill a rhino, but it's nice to know that my humble dire avengers can potentially shave the last couple of wounds off of said rhino after my fire dragons and dark reapers are dead.

It also means that you have to pay attention to the metagame and understand which weapons you need to bring to make a TAC list instead of spamming plasma because it's best against everything.

I'd argue that that's bad for non-tournament/competitive games. As Lance points out, that creates an extra barrier to entry. You shouldn't have to follow tournament rankings and forum threads discussing list optimization just to avoid being punished for liking the fluff/look/playstyle of a unit that isn't competitive in the meta. If two newbies put together lists that they link look cool and have a game, they should be able to have a good game. It shouldn't be a blowout because one guy thought tactical marines looked cool and the other guy wanted a tank regiment.

Wyldhunt wrote:

I'd argue that that's bad for non-tournament/competitive games. As Lance points out, that creates an extra barrier to entry. You shouldn't have to follow tournament rankings and forum threads discussing list optimization just to avoid being punished for liking the fluff/look/playstyle of a unit that isn't competitive in the meta. If two newbies put together lists that they link look cool and have a game, they should be able to have a good game. It shouldn't be a blowout because one guy thought tactical marines looked cool and the other guy wanted a tank regiment.

I think the issue is that GW decided that the solution to help people make TAC lists is to make everything TAC. But the result is that people zeroed in on what was the best TAC and spammed that.

If you reduced the randomness of heavy weapons to some extent (EG changing lascannons from D6 damage to 2D3, or just a flat 6!) then having vehicles which can't be hurt by small arms is fine, because the heavy weapons will deal with them.

And whilst I think that it isn't going to be the best introduction for a noob, I do believe that if you bring a list which cannot bring down tanks, you deserve to get rolled over by tanks.

It is also worth noting that the parking lot was usually an easy thing to crack with melee and getting behind them.

I guess I'm just nostalgic for the time when every army you faced was a bit of a challenge, and required clever thinking and tactics to get the most out of your army against theirs. Now, shoot from whatever angle you like, at whatever you like. the hardest thing to work out is to shoot high strength high damage weapons at high toughness high wound models. It's not a challenge.

Wasn't one of the key tenets of 8th edition that everything had the possibility of wounding everything else?

 Brother Castor wrote:
Wasn't one of the key tenets of 8th edition that everything had the possibility of wounding everything else?

And that isn't necessarily a good thing.

I would not expect my gretchin to stand a chance of taking a wound off a landraider by punching it. It's needless mollycoddling to remove the consequence of poor listbuilding and bad balancing. It's not just a symptom of the snowflake generation, it's a cause.

I honestly think that a hefty backtrack is needed here. Bring back the force organisation chart, Bring back armour facings. The issue with making armour good this edition is that it will make spam too powerful. so get rid of spam, and the problem lessens. If you only have a few slots for powerful tanks, and are therefore forced to bring a mixed army to the table, then the game will become more balanced. Allowing you to bring anything you like and allowing anything to hurt anything is like allowing a child to do whatever it wants. It spoils it. Without rules and consequence, the game will become meaningless.

the dual force org system in 7th worked well, I think. The current issue is that people can bring more powerful units with less of the "tax" of having a coherent army. "take whatever you want" was an occasional houserule amongst friends, it shouldn't have become the actual rules.

As for the issue that people will target the enemy's anti-tank is a tactical thing, and can be addressed in the balancing of the game; a 100pt tank should not need 100pts of anti-tank to take it out. It is paying points for immunity to small arms, and the speed and firepower which being a tank provides. 50pts of anti-tank should stand a chance of taking out 100pts of tank. Making anti-tank weapons more powerful by increasing their damage stat will help. I would probably make them a little more pricey as well, as you don't want lascannon spam to be the next big thing. they should be too expensive to be effective at shooting infantry, and cheap enough to be effective at blowing tanks up.

As such, an army which is 50:50 anti-tank and anti-infantry should be able to cope with an army of all tanks. Bear in mind, a lot of the tanks need infantry squads to go in them!

 Brother Castor wrote:
Wasn't one of the key tenets of 8th edition that everything had the possibility of wounding everything else?

yes it was. it was an inntresting idea, but that is where it should have stopped.
a tank should never EVER be able to be damaged by a puny simple rifle, nor should a heavily armored battlesuit.

I'm actually wondering whether you could do the opposite of what they did with 8th and give everything an armour value...

By using the system of:

S+D6 vs T
if S+D6 = T then it's a glancing blow
if S+D6 > T it's a penetrating blow
if the D6 is a 1, it cannot be more than a glancing blow.

Assuming we keep the strength of weapons the same:
Gretchin: T6 (S2 wounds on a 4+, S5 weapons auto-wound)
Guardsman: T7 (S3 wounds on a 4+, S6 auto-wounds)
Marine: T8 (S4 wounds on a 4+, immune to S1, S7 auto-wounds)
Terminator: T9 (S5 wounds on a 4+, immune to S2, S8 auto-wounds)
Trukk: T10 (S6 wounds on 4+, immune to S3, S9 auto-wounds)
Rhino: T11 (S7 wounds on a 4+, immune to S4, S10 auto-wounds)
Dreadnaught: T12 (S8 wounds on 4+, immune to S5, S11 auto-wounds)
Vindicator: T13 (S9 wounds on 4+, immune to S6, S12 auto-wounds)
Landraider: T14 (S10 woundson 4+, immune to S7, S13 auto-wounds)

If you then add a rule to non-walker vehicles:

Cumbersome: When this model is attacked in close combat, The attacking models add +2 to their to wound roll.

This represents the units targeting weak spots.


This doesn't do a lot for the manoeuvring aspect, but it would unify the rules whilst still allowing some units to be immune to some weapons. Elite units become harder to kill with small arms, but weaker to high power. Lascannons shooting at terminators will always wound if they hit, but rolling a 1 to wound means only 1 damage.

If you also put armour facings back on vehicles it would add manoeuvring back in. It's just an interesting thought, I'm not seriously proposing that it be done!

 some bloke wrote:
I'm actually wondering whether you could do the opposite of what they did with 8th and give everything an armour value...

By using the system of:

S+D6 vs T
if S+D6 = T then it's a glancing blow
if S+D6 > T it's a penetrating blow
if the D6 is a 1, it cannot be more than a glancing blow.

Assuming we keep the strength of weapons the same:
Gretchin: T6 (S2 wounds on a 4+, S5 weapons auto-wound)
Guardsman: T7 (S3 wounds on a 4+, S6 auto-wounds)
Marine: T8 (S4 wounds on a 4+, immune to S1, S7 auto-wounds)
Terminator: T9 (S5 wounds on a 4+, immune to S2, S8 auto-wounds)
Trukk: T10 (S6 wounds on 4+, immune to S3, S9 auto-wounds)
Rhino: T11 (S7 wounds on a 4+, immune to S4, S10 auto-wounds)
Dreadnaught: T12 (S8 wounds on 4+, immune to S5, S11 auto-wounds)
Vindicator: T13 (S9 wounds on 4+, immune to S6, S12 auto-wounds)
Landraider: T14 (S10 woundson 4+, immune to S7, S13 auto-wounds)

If you then add a rule to non-walker vehicles:

Cumbersome: When this model is attacked in close combat, The attacking models add +2 to their to wound roll.

This represents the units targeting weak spots.


This doesn't do a lot for the manoeuvring aspect, but it would unify the rules whilst still allowing some units to be immune to some weapons. Elite units become harder to kill with small arms, but weaker to high power. Lascannons shooting at terminators will always wound if they hit, but rolling a 1 to wound means only 1 damage.

If you also put armour facings back on vehicles it would add manoeuvring back in. It's just an interesting thought, I'm not seriously proposing that it be done!

If you want an approximate picture of how a game built this way would look this is how Bolt Action (d6s) and Beyond the Gates of Antares (d10s) work.

 some bloke wrote:

Wyldhunt wrote:

I'd argue that that's bad for non-tournament/competitive games. As Lance points out, that creates an extra barrier to entry. You shouldn't have to follow tournament rankings and forum threads discussing list optimization just to avoid being punished for liking the fluff/look/playstyle of a unit that isn't competitive in the meta. If two newbies put together lists that they link look cool and have a game, they should be able to have a good game. It shouldn't be a blowout because one guy thought tactical marines looked cool and the other guy wanted a tank regiment.

I think the issue is that GW decided that the solution to help people make TAC lists is to make everything TAC. But the result is that people zeroed in on what was the best TAC and spammed that.

If you reduced the randomness of heavy weapons to some extent (EG changing lascannons from D6 damage to 2D3, or just a flat 6!) then having vehicles which can't be hurt by small arms is fine, because the heavy weapons will deal with them.

And whilst I think that it isn't going to be the best introduction for a noob, I do believe that if you bring a list which cannot bring down tanks, you deserve to get rolled over by tanks.

It is also worth noting that the parking lot was usually an easy thing to crack with melee and getting behind them.

I guess I'm just nostalgic for the time when every army you faced was a bit of a challenge, and required clever thinking and tactics to get the most out of your army against theirs. Now, shoot from whatever angle you like, at whatever you like. the hardest thing to work out is to shoot high strength high damage weapons at high toughness high wound models. It's not a challenge.

If Lascannons do a flat 6, what do Knight weapons do?

 JNAProductions wrote:
...If Lascannons do a flat 6, what do Knight weapons do?

If you want to bump lascannons from 3.5 (avg.) damage to 6 damage it needs to come some with wound count rescaling (ex. all monsters/vehicles get 2x current wound count) to make up for it, and if you do that Knight weapons might do 10-12.

 some bloke wrote:

 Brother Castor wrote:
Wasn't one of the key tenets of 8th edition that everything had the possibility of wounding everything else?

And that isn't necessarily a good thing.

I would not expect my gretchin to stand a chance of taking a wound off a landraider by punching it. It's needless mollycoddling to remove the consequence of poor listbuilding and bad balancing. It's not just a symptom of the snowflake generation, it's a cause.

I honestly think that a hefty backtrack is needed here. Bring back the force organisation chart, Bring back armour facings. The issue with making armour good this edition is that it will make spam too powerful. so get rid of spam, and the problem lessens. If you only have a few slots for powerful tanks, and are therefore forced to bring a mixed army to the table, then the game will become more balanced. Allowing you to bring anything you like and allowing anything to hurt anything is like allowing a child to do whatever it wants. It spoils it. Without rules and consequence, the game will become meaningless.

the dual force org system in 7th worked well, I think. The current issue is that people can bring more powerful units with less of the "tax" of having a coherent army. "take whatever you want" was an occasional houserule amongst friends, it shouldn't have become the actual rules.

As for the issue that people will target the enemy's anti-tank is a tactical thing, and can be addressed in the balancing of the game; a 100pt tank should not need 100pts of anti-tank to take it out. It is paying points for immunity to small arms, and the speed and firepower which being a tank provides. 50pts of anti-tank should stand a chance of taking out 100pts of tank. Making anti-tank weapons more powerful by increasing their damage stat will help. I would probably make them a little more pricey as well, as you don't want lascannon spam to be the next big thing. they should be too expensive to be effective at shooting infantry, and cheap enough to be effective at blowing tanks up.

As such, an army which is 50:50 anti-tank and anti-infantry should be able to cope with an army of all tanks. Bear in mind, a lot of the tanks need infantry squads to go in them!

I don't think this is the real issue. The real issue, as usual, is miscosted units. 7th ed did NOT work well. The dual force org didn't help the problem of miscosted units.

A 50:50 army can deal with an all tank army, unless the tank army flies. Because many flying shooters are undercosted.

This game has never locked down spam, so don't expect that to be a thing, either.

Hey, while we go back to 7th, can we bring back blasts and templates? It would simplify facings and force a more tactical game. for facings, if you have Line of Sight and range, put the blast on whatever facing you can target and resolve the shot. for tactical play, if you want to group up your infantry feel free, BUT they become a magnet for blast weapons.

Knights were an auto win against Orks.

Some armies are designed around lacking in certain options and to make up those deficiencies through smarter play. But when an army can shut down the options you have at the army building stage, then there's no "tactical" game, it's just "Hope you roll enough 6s to do the job"/

 some bloke wrote:

Wyldhunt wrote:

I'd argue that that's bad for non-tournament/competitive games. As Lance points out, that creates an extra barrier to entry. You shouldn't have to follow tournament rankings and forum threads discussing list optimization just to avoid being punished for liking the fluff/look/playstyle of a unit that isn't competitive in the meta. If two newbies put together lists that they link look cool and have a game, they should be able to have a good game. It shouldn't be a blowout because one guy thought tactical marines looked cool and the other guy wanted a tank regiment.

I think the issue is that GW decided that the solution to help people make TAC lists is to make everything TAC. But the result is that people zeroed in on what was the best TAC and spammed that.

I'd argue that letting everything hurt everything else doesn't necessarily make everything "TAC" though. A bunch of bolter marines or even bolter sisters are a pretty inefficient way of going after a knight or even a rhino. You're still way better off taking an actual anti-tank gun if you want to trade well against a vehicle. But giving vehicles an armor value again just means those bolters aren't allowed to hurt tanks at all.

If you reduced the randomness of heavy weapons to some extent (EG changing lascannons from D6 damage to 2D3, or just a flat 6!) then having vehicles which can't be hurt by small arms is fine, because the heavy weapons will deal with them.

That hasn't been my experience in the past. When I started playing in 5th edition, my fire dragons were scarily efficient tank killers. However, the nature of eldar at the time meant that all of my "good" anti-tank was concentrated in a limited number of places; mostly in fire dragon squads. So even if I spammed fire dragons (max of 3 units at that time), an armor spam list was typically able to take my initial dragon attacks on the chin, lose a few vehicles, and then use their remaining vehicles to kill off my dragons and whatever other semi-efficient anti tank guns I had before I could clear through their parking lot. It wasn't much fun (on the winning or losing end) when one player realized they'd killed all of the other guy's anti tank and basically had X invulnerable units left to run around the table with.

It stinks when you literally cannot hurt any of the enemy's units. Even if you win, it's not because you won a boxing match; it's because you survived the end game beating.

And whilst I think that it isn't going to be the best introduction for a noob, I do believe that if you bring a list which cannot bring down tanks, you deserve to get rolled over by tanks.

Any list that doesn't bring a lot of anti-vehicle against a list with a lot of vehicles is going to struggle to damage, obviously. But how does changing it from, "You'll have a hard time killing my stuff," to, "You're not allowed to kill my stuff" improve the situation? How does that improve the game? How does that add to the fun of a player who brought a vanilla list against a vehicle-heavy skew list? I'm just not seeing it. :(

It is also worth noting that the parking lot was usually an easy thing to crack with melee and getting behind them.

It was reasonably easy if you had an army with strength 4 or higher on everything, the ability to deepstrike without mishapping, and vehicles could be stun locked or only had 3ish hull points and no saves most of the time. Big chunks of my aeldari collection literally cannot hurt AV10 in melee. But we may be getting into the weeds here.

I guess I'm just nostalgic for the time when every army you faced was a bit of a challenge, and required clever thinking and tactics to get the most out of your army against theirs. Now, shoot from whatever angle you like, at whatever you like. the hardest thing to work out is to shoot high strength high damage weapons at high toughness high wound models. It's not a challenge.

I may be wearing whatever the opposite of rose-tinted glasses are, but that's really not how I remember AV working. I remember agonizing over whether or not each weapon on a model was in this arc of its target or that arc. I remember shooting at rear armor usually being something that only happened if you deepstruck behind your target (not really a tactical decision so much as an obvious choice most of the time) or happened to be shooting at a melee walker that was required to get close enough to you to expose its back. Most enemy vehicles had the same AV on the sides as on the front, and if there was a difference, it usually just meant that you either had the mobility to scoot into the side arc or you didn't.

I don't recall thinking to myself that I was especially clever for opting to shoot at the weak side of the vehicle instead of the tough side. It was just a matter of whether or not I happened to have the mobility to after a weaker armor facing that turn. Maybe it's been long enough for me to have forgotten the rewarding intricacies of armor facing, but all I really remember is:

1. Point the squishy end of the tank away from the enemy.
2. Move or deepstrike so that you're facing the squishy end of the enemy tank when you can.

I feel like armor facing, like many of the rules dropped in 8th edition, created the illussion of meaningful tactical decisions when it really just created complexity and occassional disagreements over where the side arcs were.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 some bloke wrote:


I would not expect my gretchin to stand a chance of taking a wound off a landraider by punching it. It's needless mollycoddling to remove the consequence of poor listbuilding and bad balancing. It's not just a symptom of the snowflake generation, it's a cause.

I honestly think that a hefty backtrack is needed here. Bring back the force organisation chart, Bring back armour facings. The issue with making armour good this edition is that it will make spam too powerful. so get rid of spam, and the problem lessens. If you only have a few slots for powerful tanks, and are therefore forced to bring a mixed army to the table, then the game will become more balanced. Allowing you to bring anything you like and allowing anything to hurt anything is like allowing a child to do whatever it wants. It spoils it. Without rules and consequence, the game will become meaningless.

the dual force org system in 7th worked well, I think. The current issue is that people can bring more powerful units with less of the "tax" of having a coherent army. "take whatever you want" was an occasional houserule amongst friends, it shouldn't have become the actual rules.

I wouldn't expect your gretchin to have much success punching a tank etiher, but shooting into firepoints, ramming junk into treads and and exposed engines, or simply yanking open a hatch and biting the tank crew's fingers off might accomplish something!

Forcing people to "bring a mixed army to the table" has merit as an idea, but going back to a double CAD or even a single force org chart won't do that. In a single CAD, I can field vehicles in every slot except troops (wasp assault walkers for elites) and take a wraithseer for an HQ (not a vehicle, but still beefy). I know that BA and SW can do the same, and plenty of armies can get close. The battlefield role (force org slot) a unit occupies is kind of arbitrary in 40k.

If you want to put a limit on how many high toughness, high wound models a player fields, the simplest way would probably be to make a percentile limit.

"No more than X% of a player's total points may be spent on units with more than Y Toughness and/or more than Z wounds on a single model." Or some such thing.

This has merit from a mechanical perspective, but it does mean that, for better or worse, you're telling people that they're not allowed to field an all dreadnaught army or an IG tank regiment or 'nid zilla. And to flip that around, isn't there merit in FORCING people to field X% of their points as anti-tank units? Between a maximum points percentage spent on "big stuff" and a minimum points percentage spent on "things that can kill big stuff," you'd theoretically be able to force players to have a fighting chance of killing all their opponents' models. But at that point, you're telling tyranid players that a bunch of gaunts swarming around some tervigons isn't a valid army unless there are also hive guard behind them. Your marine army with 6 tactical squads each equipped with maxed out meltaguns might be legal, but the same army with a few flamers instead of meltas is not.

To what extent should the rules build a person's list for them? Which thematic armies, including armies with rules support right now, should stop being legal to enforce the "correct" ratio of units and weapons being selected? But now we're talking about changes to army construction rather than the presence or absence of armor facing.

The premise of the discussion is, "Vehicles should be immune to many attacks in the game." Many of us have pointed out why such a mechanic would be (and has been) problematic and frustrating. What's the pitch for why the game would be better if vehicles were immune to a large swath of the offense in the game?

 Luke_Prowler wrote:
Knights were an auto win against Orks.

I actually won a game against knights with a grot horde, 2 weirdboys and a dakkajet, and actually killed 1. It helped that one of the weirdboys rolled the "get uber" perils of the warp every turn, and beat the snot out of one of the knights. He was convinced he'd just crush me! Dakkajet arrived late but chipped the last 2 HP off the knight. meanwhile, the board was mine, every objective was mine, and I won on VP by a factor of about 8.

Not bad considering I had 3 models which could actually hurt a knight, and all of them only glanced on 6's (except when the weirdboy went uber!).

I guess the main aim is to bring back thinking about where you put your models. Armour facings were a means to this end, but if you simply give +1 to wound against the rear of a vehicle, it will encourage getting behind them.

I would certainly like to bring back firing arcs on vehicles... the current system is way too abstract for my liking.