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In general I'm happy with the elimination of dedicated vehicle rules in 8th edition. However one funny effect I've been feeling is that vehicles are simultaneously too weak and too strong.

On the one hand, vehicles are too weak: anti-tank weapons are so ubiquitous to deal with knights (and much cheaper than they were in 3rd-5th or 6th editions) that lighter vehicles go up in smoke almost immediately. And medium weapons with S5 and S6 and many shots are capable of putting wounds on even fairly heavy vehicles. Finally, vehicles' size makes them almost impossible to hide anymore given true line of sight and the removal of line-of-sight blocking area terrain.

But on the other hand, vehicles also feel too strong to me: anti-tank weapons almost always do D6 random damage and are going up against tanks with 10-16 wounds. And quite a few vehicles have invulnerable saves and feel-no-pain and similar abilities. The combination of these means that in general it takes a ton of anti-tank hits to reliably kill vehicles, and you basically need to just whittle them down.

Gone are the days of a single lascannon looking dangerous; instead, destroying vehicles feels more like peeling the layers of an onion than trying to line up the perfect killshot. I guess I'm an old fogey here, but I kind of liked the days of 3rd and 4th edition where heavy anti-tank weapons were expensive and rare, but each hit had a decent chance of wrecking a vehicle.

Does anyone else feel similarly?

The problem with

trying to line up the perfect killshot

is that while awesome sounding in a narrative sense, I really don't think there's any mechanic that can satisfactorily represent this in a dice game. In a game that essentially consists of I move my blob of models; I shoot your blob of models; you move your blob of models; you shoot my blob of models, I actually think that

peeling the layers of an onion

is the better option. No matter how expensive you make a trooper with a lascannon in terms of points, the tank is always going to cost more money, and removing that expensive tank from the table in the first couple of turns is going to hurt a lot more than removing the trooper.

That said, I do agree with what I think is your essential point about heavy weapons being too ubiquitous as a requirement to deal with Knights and such, but I believe the problem here is with those big centerpiece models. It's been stated ad nauseum on this forum, but I'll repeat it anyway: giant super heavies are more akin to action figure scales like Gundam and Transformers than in 40k and seem very out of place save in games that are either very large or where they serve a specific narrative purpose. Having very large models be as common as they are in the casual hobby just seems very wrong to me, and results in the kinds of effects you're describing here.

Pointed Stick wrote:

Gone are the days of a single lascannon looking dangerous; instead, destroying vehicles feels more like peeling the layers of an onion than trying to line up the perfect killshot. I guess I'm an old fogey here, but I kind of liked the days of 3rd and 4th edition where heavy anti-tank weapons were expensive and rare, but each hit had a decent chance of wrecking a vehicle.

Does anyone else feel similarly?

Yup. Those old mechanics helped balance the game more in favor towards infantry, as that single heavy weapon in a squad could one-shot a tank. AV 14 was still pretty tough, but a lot of the time you could flank those and put a Lascannon into the side of a Leman Russ and have roughly a 25% chance of a kill via Lascannon. I felt the damage mechanics were nice too. Immobilizing things or just stopping them from shooting for a turn.

The other extreme a few editions ago were vehicles were basically non-existent due to how easily Hull Points were removed and either you flooded the board with infantry or wraithknights/riptides which combined the best of both worlds.

I personally like it as it is now with some minor tweaks to make them more durable against mass S7 shooting which is the ideal AT right now.

I think vehicles overall are in a good place and unlike 6th/7th edition they feel pretty sturdy and being a vehicle doesn't mean: "This is a very squishy and clumsy unit that will never be able to shoot all the weapons you pay for it."
However, I think especially the light vehicles are partly too expensive, especially the Rhino. Yes, it is pretty durable for its costs, but it has the damage output of a 20point unit and due to the changes to movement, transports are hardly needed anymore - infantry is fast enough most of the time and can move through terrain easily.

Having your Leman Russ, stalwart battle tank with yard-thick armour get blown up in one shot by a scrub with a lascannon *never* felt satisfying. Vehicles are in a decidedly better place than that now, but still attract a ton of fire and become over efficient to use Strats like Doom against. It is what it is... at least they’re largely playable now!

 JohnnyHell wrote:
Having your Leman Russ, stalwart battle tank with yard-thick armour get blown up in one shot by a scrub with a lascannon *never* felt satisfying. Vehicles are in a decidedly better place than that now, but still attract a ton of fire and become over efficient to use Strats like Doom against. It is what it is... at least they’re largely playable now!

On the one hand I agree with you, but I think it's not as simple.

you either get:
The satisfaction that your LR stays on the board longer vs. the frustration that you feel while"removing the layers of the onion" (I really liked that image, OP)

or:

The satisfaction of getting the "perfect killshot" vs. the frustration that your vehicle is gone in the first round of battle.

So you'll have to somehow figure out, which of those two options causes more satisfaction or at least less frustration. And I think that is a thiing that no one can objectively do.

Waaaghbert wrote:

 JohnnyHell wrote:
Having your Leman Russ, stalwart battle tank with yard-thick armour get blown up in one shot by a scrub with a lascannon *never* felt satisfying. Vehicles are in a decidedly better place than that now, but still attract a ton of fire and become over efficient to use Strats like Doom against. It is what it is... at least they’re largely playable now!

On the one hand I agree with you, but I think it's not as simple.

you either get:
The satisfaction that your LR stays on the board longer vs. the frustration that you feel while"removing the layers of the onion" (I really liked that image, OP)

or:

The satisfaction of getting the "perfect killshot" vs. the frustration that your vehicle is gone in the first round of battle.

So you'll have to somehow figure out, which of those two options causes more satisfaction or at least less frustration. And I think that is a thiing that no one can objectively do.

Well, I think rolling a 6 on a Damage D6 weapon comes pretty close to the old vehicle chart. Yes, you don't make that thing explode right away but for most vehicles you at least hurt it substantially with that lascannon-shot.

Vehicles are in the better place these days. However still not perfect, least I don't think so. The issue with vehicles before 6-7 is that it felt off MCs seemed to just function better over all over a vehicle. Like soft killing a vehicle with forever shaking it was a thing and an annoying thing at that.

Then we got hull points which were the poor mans wounds. Then vehicles still could get soft killed but at the same time felt like they were made of rusty junk and just fell apart after 3 or hits and could still explode early, still a little lame. I'd say more lame than before.

So now they are over all better but I'm not sure if we couldn't make them better or at least function better yet. I just don't know what way that would be.

If vehicles had better armor save(and also less ++ saves) and more wounds you could increase ap on things like lascannon and melta while also increasing their damage by quite a lot. Increasing vehicle toughness and top end weapon strength at the same time would also make it better. It shouldnt be ++ saves, fnp, - to hit or - to damage modifiers that make vehicles tough. That they are huge amounts of moving metal should be enough to make them more survivable than infantry.

Then vehicles would feel stronger against things like heavy bolters while lascannons or meltas would feel more threatening again. Especially if they tweaked the degradation profiles or at least made it harder to work around.

Right now you might kill a knight with 5 lascannon/melta shots if lucky but you would probably need closer to 25-30 of them. So if you need many shots anyway you could just do it with autocannons/plasma as it is now. With better weapon balancing it would take maybe 15 lascannon/ lr 10melta shots and at the same time feel like shooting anything between a Heavy Bolter or plasma profile is a waste of ammunition or a desperate measure to take off the last few wounds. Not your main anti tank option.

Same with transports. They should have more wounds but maybe not as much more T or Save or - to hit. They should take a beating but after X lascannons or equivalent you should be pretty sure it is dead. And at least give the models inside a save before they just die. Having multiwound units with 2+/3++ save inside a transport is really dangerous. Lost 3/5 TH/SS terminators due to that explosion in my first 8th ed game and realised what a death trap it is.

I think if they were able to bring back the damage chart for vehicles it would make them far more interesting. Shaking and stunning a tank was a valid tactic to neuter a tank for a turn while you had other things to do.

It was also thematic as hell, an immobilised tank in the middle of a densely packed board, weapons getting destroyed as it gets whittled down, that was cool. Now tanks are just lifted from the table and don't become terrain if they get destroyed.

I do miss when battlefields got added terrain with destroyed tanks, felt pretty cool to have a vehicle or vehicles die out on the board and fight from around, move onto it for cover use even with dangerous terrain checks. Felt very cool and immersive.

Issue stems from those vehicles that inherently skew the meta: knights.

Yes well, knights have annoyed me since they were first announced long ago now. As is I've never picked one up though I do have some of the baby knights they feel pretty cool for me.

The issue isn't so much vehicals changing to wounds and toughness it's that GW insisted on staying with single digets while steam rolling the to wound chart flat.

It's why T4 doesn't matter as much as GW thinks, see marines and Orks.
Being only T3 doesnt matter alot of the time, why veing T7 is a massive downside vrs S7/S8 weapons vrs T8 a lascannon being S9 vrs autocannons at S7 or S8 plasma. It's at best a 16% improvement in wounding vrs 100% more shots, and less points.

Flat damage for lascannons and melta would help but would also be back to the days of vehicals are made of paper in 40k.

Vehicals need to start with way more wounds and Toughness spread to actually allow the flat as a pancake wounding chart to show any changes.

But wouldn't that be a problem, when someone brings a ton of vehicles, or something extremly resilient like an old style castellan?

flat damage is okey, when opponents has 3-4 vehicles, it becaomes a totaly different thing when he has 5-6 and something huge. Then to counter that you need vehicles of your own, or fire power that melts opposing armies.

Klickor wrote:
...

Right now you might kill a knight with 5 lascannon/melta shots if lucky but you would probably need closer to 25-30 of them. So if you need many shots anyway you could just do it with autocannons/plasma as it is now. With better weapon balancing it would take maybe 15 lascannon/ lr 10melta shots...

Knights are not supposed to be countered by lascannons, they are very purposefully supposed to be able to tank bigger guns because they're meant to operate in scenarios where high damage high AP weapons are plentiful between titanic units. It's not a failure of Knight design that they are vulnerable to AP0/-1 instead of AP-3/-4, it's a feature of their design. Take something like a Leman Russ or a Predator instead and you'll see that most often the lascannon does perform better than its competitors, ignoring Combat Doctrines at least. Plasma should not be affected by to-hit modifiers or re-rolls in terms of how many models die from firing the guns, because then you'd actually see some very nice differentiation between the guns, just like if you had an Aura ability that let you re-roll damage rolls then the lascannon would become a lot better, that just doesn't exist while the re-roll hit rolls of 1 is relatively easy to come by, especially for Astartes.

Then you just make a few core rule changes as well. Make vehicles unable to hold objectives or let melee units get bonuses in combat. Like how powerfists and grenades were lethal against tanks in the old days so if you dont have enough non tanks to support them they lose. Or you make a few force organisation/detachment changes that it isnt viable to go all tanks. Or make tank traps common terrain features that makes tanks less viable to be spammed. A bit like how the guard super heavy tanks are quite limited on terrain heavy tables compared to knights. They are wider and shorter so they cant move terrain as easy or see over the terrain.

In real world you want infantry to support your own tanks and there should be in game reasons for that as well.

There are lots of ways to make up for not every gun being able to threaten a tank. Maybe not so well in 8th edition with its bare minimun of core rules but it could easily be expanded while implementing changes.

Karol wrote:
But wouldn't that be a problem, when someone brings a ton of vehicles, or something extremly resilient like an old style castellan?

flat damage is okey, when opponents has 3-4 vehicles, it becaomes a totaly different thing when he has 5-6 and something huge. Then to counter that you need vehicles of your own, or fire power that melts opposing armies.

1 your not seeing the level of shift in profiles required
All vehicals become T10 to T20
Actual anti tank weapons such as lascannons etc get S doubled.
Heavy Bolter autocannons etc stay as they are. Invulnerable saves die and forcefield etc go to save or wound roll modifiers.

A melta would go to flat 6 damage so you get rewarded for using the right tool for the right job not just spamming rof S5-7 D1-2 weapons against everything.

People already do that with -2 to hit move blocking eldar flyer spam.

Ah, hmm wouldn't that also require ditching the d6 or at least expending to useing stuff like d12 and d20s etc?

 vict0988 wrote:

Klickor wrote:
...

Right now you might kill a knight with 5 lascannon/melta shots if lucky but you would probably need closer to 25-30 of them. So if you need many shots anyway you could just do it with autocannons/plasma as it is now. With better weapon balancing it would take maybe 15 lascannon/ lr 10melta shots...

Knights are not supposed to be countered by lascannons, they are very purposefully supposed to be able to tank bigger guns because they're meant to operate in scenarios where high damage high AP weapons are plentiful between titanic units. It's not a failure of Knight design that they are vulnerable to AP0/-1 instead of AP-3/-4, it's a feature of their design. Take something like a Leman Russ or a Predator instead and you'll see that most often the lascannon does perform better than its competitors, ignoring Combat Doctrines at least. Plasma should not be affected by to-hit modifiers or re-rolls in terms of how many models die from firing the guns, because then you'd actually see some very nice differentiation between the guns, just like if you had an Aura ability that let you re-roll damage rolls then the lascannon would become a lot better, that just doesn't exist while the re-roll hit rolls of 1 is relatively easy to come by, especially for Astartes.

Ofc they are able to survive some lascannon fire. But are you seriously telling me that a lascannon should be worse point for point than a heavy bolter against a knight? That knights should be weak to anti infantry fire?

I think a knight should be harder to kill than a leman russ but you should want heavy weapons against both. Not lascannons against the leman russ and then auto cannons against the knights.

I was just spouting numbers to make an example of what is wrong with the way anti tank guns work. 200pts of lascannons or meltas should ofc be more effective than 200pts heavy boltets, auto cannons and plasma against all vehicles. That is my point. Even against knights.

At lighter vehicles, transports like rhinos, its fine if plasma cannons and autocannons are almost as good. But right now plasma is overall better which is a problem. You cant really just change tanks at this point if you also dont change how the weapons work to make anti tank weapons worthwhile.

I feel like vehicles need one major shift - abandon invulnerable saves on them but increase total wounds.

A higher wound count, and a higher potential damage output from things like Melta and Las would make those weapons worthwhile against these targets as their higher AP and higher damage potential would both apply against the very targets they are designed to hunt.

And a higher wound count would mean those 2 damage, high rof weapons become less valuable in this role. Still good in a pinch, but not the best.

Klickor wrote:

 vict0988 wrote:

Klickor wrote:
...

Right now you might kill a knight with 5 lascannon/melta shots if lucky but you would probably need closer to 25-30 of them. So if you need many shots anyway you could just do it with autocannons/plasma as it is now. With better weapon balancing it would take maybe 15 lascannon/ lr 10melta shots...

Knights are not supposed to be countered by lascannons, they are very purposefully supposed to be able to tank bigger guns because they're meant to operate in scenarios where high damage high AP weapons are plentiful between titanic units. It's not a failure of Knight design that they are vulnerable to AP0/-1 instead of AP-3/-4, it's a feature of their design. Take something like a Leman Russ or a Predator instead and you'll see that most often the lascannon does perform better than its competitors, ignoring Combat Doctrines at least. Plasma should not be affected by to-hit modifiers or re-rolls in terms of how many models die from firing the guns, because then you'd actually see some very nice differentiation between the guns, just like if you had an Aura ability that let you re-roll damage rolls then the lascannon would become a lot better, that just doesn't exist while the re-roll hit rolls of 1 is relatively easy to come by, especially for Astartes.

Ofc they are able to survive some lascannon fire. But are you seriously telling me that a lascannon should be worse point for point than a heavy bolter against a knight? That knights should be weak to anti infantry fire?

I think a knight should be harder to kill than a leman russ but you should want heavy weapons against both. Not lascannons against the leman russ and then auto cannons against the knights.

I was just spouting numbers to make an example of what is wrong with the way anti tank guns work. 200pts of lascannons or meltas should ofc be more effective than 200pts heavy boltets, auto cannons and plasma against all vehicles. That is my point. Even against knights.

At lighter vehicles, transports like rhinos, its fine if plasma cannons and autocannons are almost as good. But right now plasma is overall better which is a problem. You cant really just change tanks at this point if you also dont change how the weapons work to make anti tank weapons worthwhile.

They both hit on the same thing so assume both heavy bolters and lascannons hit automatically.

Lascannons do an average of 3,5 damage, need 1,5 times as many shots to punch through armour, 1,5 times as many shots to punch through toughness and fire 1 shot.
Number of lascannon Devs needed to destroy a Knight = 24/3,5*1,5*1,5/1=15,4

Lascannon Devastators cost 37 pts per model.
Number of pts worth of lascannon Devs required to destroy a Knight = 15,4*37=569,8‬

Heavy bolters do 1 damage, need 2 times as many shots to punch through armour, 3 times as many shots to punch through toughness and fire 3 shots.
Number of HB Devs needed to destroy a Knight = 24/1*2*3/3=48

Heavy bolter Devastators cost 22 pts per model.
Number of pts worth of HB Devs required to destroy a Knight = 48*22=1056

Comparing durability HB Devastators are 1,68x as tough as lascannon Devastators.

What is the actual problem causing the issue? Knight Relics and Stratagems that further fortify them against lascannons. Re-roll abilities that make overcharging plasma a breeze. Rules that double the AP and D of heavy bolters but hardly benefit lascannons.

Vehicles not having a 2+ Sv is pretty stupid, with the exception of open-topped vehicles they should pretty much all have a 2+ Sv and some might deserve a 1+ save. That would make heavy bolters (leaving out combat doctrines) much worse at busting tanks but wouldn't impact lascannons nearly as much. The alternative is changing the whole S/T system which I personally like less as a solution because the current rules for wounding are so simple to explain, nearly everyone has it down in their first game and when I play them again most of them can remember. No more wound charts please. Just think about what story GW is telling us as well, a flayer claw (Necron scissorhands) is better against Dreadnoughts than Terminator armour. What?

A lot of the issues that Vehicles have now in 40k is due to the shift in scale. The game has gone from a Squad leve game (2nd edition), to a Platoon level game (3rd - 5th edition), to a 28mm version of Epic (6th-8th edition). Then add in the model range stretching to include things like knights, super heavies I to the base game. Sure these things have always been around, but they were restricted to special formats of the core game. The rules needed to use such things wasn't covered by the core rules.

As a result of this vehicles have been put in an odd place, where what was previously seen as a tough vehicle is now seen as quite weak. The scale and scope of the game got bigger.

What is the biggest loss is transport vehicles, they are now usually slower than the unit they are carrying, and don't offer as much protection.

Perhaps the addition of the armoured keyword to vehicles and the addition of the penetrating keyword to actual anti tank weapons could work?
Something along the lines of the armoured keyword ignoring the ap of weapons unless it has the penetrating keyword, which would apply to things like las cannon and plasma weapons but not anti infantry weapons like heavy bolters and assault cannons?

kingheff wrote:
Perhaps the addition of the armoured keyword to vehicles and the addition of the penetrating keyword to actual anti tank weapons could work?
Something along the lines of the armoured keyword ignoring the ap of weapons unless it has the penetrating keyword, which would apply to things like las cannon and plasma weapons but not anti infantry weapons like heavy bolters and assault cannons?

Plasma isn't an anti vehical weapon it's anti heavy infantry, it's one of the worst contributions to the very problem we are discussing.

Ice_can wrote:

kingheff wrote:
Perhaps the addition of the armoured keyword to vehicles and the addition of the penetrating keyword to actual anti tank weapons could work?
Something along the lines of the armoured keyword ignoring the ap of weapons unless it has the penetrating keyword, which would apply to things like las cannon and plasma weapons but not anti infantry weapons like heavy bolters and assault cannons?

Plasma isn't an anti vehical weapon it's anti heavy infantry, it's one of the worst contributions to the very problem we are discussing.

Hellblasters indicate that GW fully intends plasma to be a light infantry cracker in sufficant numbers

You need about 31 lascannon shots to kill a t8 4++ knight. Not 20.

Unsure what you are trying to say though. Are Knights designed to not be weak against anti tank yet we should redesign how tanks and weapons work so they are?

Im in the mind that GW doesnt really know how to do it and to not make some vehicles too weak they added ++ saves or other modifiers instead of just buffing toughness, wounds and normal save. Probably they werent allowed to go ham with changing those attributes in a single codex so to keep the profile relatively the same they have instead tried working around that with adding special rules. Sure it makes the vehicles tougher but it messes with the weapon dynamics.

When did plasma start being good against vehicles? It has to be 5th ed or earlier, where does the plasma = anti-infantry idea come from?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Klickor wrote:
You need about 31 lascannon shots to kill a t8 4++ knight. Not 20.

What gives it a 4++?

 vict0988 wrote:
When did plasma start being good against vehicles? It has to be 5th ed or earlier, where does the plasma = anti-infantry idea come from?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Klickor wrote:
You need about 31 lascannon shots to kill a t8 4++ knight. Not 20.

What gives it a 4++?

Plasma wasnt reliable enough to kill vehicles back in 4th/5th since they couldnt even glance av 14 and barely touch av 13. But they had ap 2 so they were the best weapons against terminators, space marines and other monsters. Plasma was ok only against stuff like rhinos. You got more shots/blast out of plasma than pure AT weapons and since AT weapons only did 1 shot/damage each they werent good against non tanks.
Missile launchers were better than plasma against tanks and infantry blobs but at the same time also much worse against 2+ save models. Hence plasma as the marine/light vehicle killer.

Umm you have both a warlord trait or relic and a stratagem for the knights. If a list only has a single knight or 2 you can expect it to have a 4++ in the shooting phase.