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Made in us
Fixture of Dakka





 Canadian 5th wrote:

That same armor spam list won't be able to hold ground that well allowing you to play the mission while they're stuck trying to table you.

It's not just about winning though. I might win that game, but it's going to be a miserable game. If someone asks me for a boxing match, it's understood that we'll be punching each other. It's not expected that I'll stand still while he punches me in the face for ten minutes. Being the winner at the end of the face mutilation doesn't do much to improve the experience.


The issue is that under current rules both can be brought down by massed medium arms fire with things like assault cannons and plasma being better anti-tank than most dedicated anti-tank weapons. So there isn't any way to make a Land Raider tough enough to be useful that wouldn't skew a Knight into either being too fragile for its points or unkillable. By bringing back armor facings you limit the number of shots taken at high AV vehicles and, if you must keep superheavies in your game, allow for differentiation via things like hull points or vid shields that can fall and come back as the game progresses.

Bolded for emphasis. If the bolded portion is the crux of the issue, then that, to me, says that dedicated anti-tank guns should be better in that role; not that all other weapons should be worse at it. And we're getting improved melta in the near future, so it will be interesting to see how that pans out.

You can give specialist units special rules that allow them to break normal target priority. Snipers, for example, already do that.

Alright, but which units get that sort of rule? Do devastators get to shoot at whatever they want, or is there a chance that their lascannons will sometimes be forced to target a guardsmen screen instead of the tank behind it? Dark reapers? How about melta chosen that happen to be a half an inch closer to a screen than to their vehicle target? What portions of the tau army don't have to shoot at the front line fodder? But again, I'm not necessarily against bringing back priority tests. My point was just that it's a huge change that goes beyond the topic at hand.


Tanks being immune to small arms worked for 7 editions and was never the main complaint in any of them. So why is it suddenly going to be a huge issue now?

I started playing in 5th. I definitely got sick of parking lots. That's a big part of why I tend to be anti-vehicle-immunity in threads like this. I remember feeling like I had to ignore huge swathes of my codex in favor of taking yet another squad of fire dragons because I basically stopped being allowed to interact with the enemy army once my anti-tank ran out. I remember ramming wave serpents into enemy tanks because ramming and a storm guardian with a fusion gun were the last things in my list that could hurt the enemy. It wasn't great.


You can't fix vehicles in 9th edition without major changes. The current trend of anything without a 4++ save being worthless doesn't fix it, nerfing damage output requires more work than my rollback suggestion,

I'm not sure I buy that anything without a 4++ is "worthless." Wave serpents were held in pretty high regard throughout 8th and seem to be more popular now. In fact, most eldar tanks seem to be pretty well-regarded this edition. Even the falcon has a place. Not a lot of invuls on those things. Repulsors also seem to pop up and do pretty alright recently. Tanks seem to be a core part of sisters armies. Being able to shoot in combat has also helped out things that used to fear getting bogged down in melee.


and just upping tank toughness values by a point each hardly changes which weapons are effective against them due to the new wounding chart.

I'd prefer upping Toughness by a point rather than making vehicles literally immune to low strength, but even that isn't ideal to me. You've said that you're not bothered by how lethal strength 4 guns are against vehicles at the moment, but upping T7 vehicles (most marine and eldar vehicles plus plenty of others) to T8 would cut strength 4 attacks' number of wounds in half. And there's a lot of strength 4 in the game. So part of my concern with your proposals so far have been from the perspective of the very common lower strength attacks in the game. I'm not opposed to strength 6 and 7 being worse against vehicles. I'm opposed to basic bolter marines, shurikens, lasguns, etc. not being able to interact with huge chunks of the enemy army.

Only we've already seen these rules and know that these issues you're bringing up weren't serious. You can literally look up 5e battle reports on this site and see how things were back then. You can even do so codex release by codex release to see which changes/additions caused the most issues.
Issues like "tyranids struggle against tanks" were a pretty big deal in 5th and are still a pretty big deal now.

Actually, overly durable units have been one of the most consistent problems from 40k. Invisible death stars with rerollable 2+ and 3+ invulnerable saves were a pain, right? Because they were too durable. Most things couldn't hurt them, or at least, couldn't hurt them efficiently. Making vehicles immune or too resistant to most forms of offense creates a similar problem. Telling people they should just take more anti tank is kind of like telling 7e players that they should just take more psychic defense to deal with the invisible death stars.

Armour facings worked ok for years. To me, what we have now is better. Not perfect, but better.


ATTENTION
. Psychic tests are unfluffy. Your longing for AV is understandable but misguided. Your chapter doesn't need a separate codex. Doctrines should go away. Being a "troop" means nothing. This has been a cranky service announcement. You may now resume your regularly scheduled arguing.
 
   
Made in ca
Stubborn Dark Angels Veteran Sergeant




Vancouver, BC

Wyldhunt wrote:
It's not just about winning though. I might win that game, but it's going to be a miserable game. If someone asks me for a boxing match, it's understood that we'll be punching each other. It's not expected that I'll stand still while he punches me in the face for ten minutes. Being the winner at the end of the face mutilation doesn't do much to improve the experience.

Show me the type of list you're worried about and we can see how much face-punching and anti-tank removing it can actually do. Given that you've already admitted that such lists are beatable show me an example of armor spam that would be miserable to play against.

Bolded for emphasis. If the bolded portion is the crux of the issue, then that, to me, says that dedicated anti-tank guns should be better in that role; not that all other weapons should be worse at it. And we're getting improved melta in the near future, so it will be interesting to see how that pans out.

That just results in things dying faster in general which does nothing to fix the issues with vehicles in 40k, which is that anything without a 4++ save dies too fast because you need that kind of firepower to deal with nasty threats like greater daemons and knights which could show up on your table and cause you trouble if you fail to account for them.

You can give specialist units special rules that allow them to break normal target priority. Snipers, for example, already do that.

Alright, but which units get that sort of rule? Do devastators get to shoot at whatever they want, or is there a chance that their lascannons will sometimes be forced to target a guardsmen screen instead of the tank behind it? Dark reapers? How about melta chosen that happen to be a half an inch closer to a screen than to their vehicle target? What portions of the tau army don't have to shoot at the front line fodder? But again, I'm not necessarily against bringing back priority tests. My point was just that it's a huge change that goes beyond the topic at hand.

I started playing in 5th. I definitely got sick of parking lots. That's a big part of why I tend to be anti-vehicle-immunity in threads like this. I remember feeling like I had to ignore huge swathes of my codex in favor of taking yet another squad of fire dragons because I basically stopped being allowed to interact with the enemy army once my anti-tank ran out. I remember ramming wave serpents into enemy tanks because ramming and a storm guardian with a fusion gun were the last things in my list that could hurt the enemy. It wasn't great.

That sounds like a personal problem and a poorly built list.

I'm not sure I buy that anything without a 4++ is "worthless." Wave serpents were held in pretty high regard throughout 8th and seem to be more popular now. In fact, most eldar tanks seem to be pretty well-regarded this edition. Even the falcon has a place. Not a lot of invuls on those things. Repulsors also seem to pop up and do pretty alright recently. Tanks seem to be a core part of sisters armies. Being able to shoot in combat has also helped out things that used to fear getting bogged down in melee.

Eldar tanks are mostly good because they either transport something valuable or carry star cannons. That and they're fast.

I'd prefer upping Toughness by a point rather than making vehicles literally immune to low strength, but even that isn't ideal to me. You've said that you're not bothered by how lethal strength 4 guns are against vehicles at the moment, but upping T7 vehicles (most marine and eldar vehicles plus plenty of others) to T8 would cut strength 4 attacks' number of wounds in half. And there's a lot of strength 4 in the game. So part of my concern with your proposals so far have been from the perspective of the very common lower strength attacks in the game. I'm not opposed to strength 6 and 7 being worse against vehicles. I'm opposed to basic bolter marines, shurikens, lasguns, etc. not being able to interact with huge chunks of the enemy army.

Why are you using bolters and shurikens to kill tanks? Where did your anti-tank go? Why aren't you deepstriking it in turn 2 to prevent it getting shot before it can start cleaning up tanks? If you play better and build a half-way decent TAC list you should be able to kill enough armor that you only stop being able kill them in turns 4 and 5 and should be ahead on objectives at that stage anyway ensuring that you both kill stuff and win.

Issues like "tyranids struggle against tanks" were a pretty big deal in 5th and are still a pretty big deal now.

We can tune nids to have better options against AV. If GW can make Eradicators, they can make some nasty anti-tank for nids.

Actually, overly durable units have been one of the most consistent problems from 40k.

Sometimes, but it was rarely ever tanks causing said issues. It was wound allocation nonsense, FMCs when dedicated anti-flier weaponry was hard to come by, or full on death stars. There were very few metas where a monolith or land raider being too durable was the root of the problem.

Telling people they should just take more anti tank is kind of like telling 7e players that they should just take more psychic defense to deal with the invisible death stars.

Comparing bring back AV to the edition that tried to kill 40k seems a little off the mark.

Armour facings worked ok for years. To me, what we have now is better. Not perfect, but better.

Tanks being gummed to death by weapons that shouldn't even scratch the paint breaks suspension of disbelief way too much for me to agree.

Ask yourself this, would a realistic military ever field an armored vehicle that could be reliably made to explode by the most common small arms in the galaxy? Its almost as dumb as BattleTech's ablative armor that somehow can only go on a walker because reasons...
   
Made in us
Fixture of Dakka





 Canadian 5th wrote:

Show me the type of list you're worried about and we can see how much face-punching and anti-tank removing it can actually do. Given that you've already admitted that such lists are beatable show me an example of armor spam that would be miserable to play against.

For the sake of discussion, let's go with some sort of triple knight or triple repulsor list. Because I've been playing craftworlders lately, let's say I bring something like a guardian defender webway bomb, a few wave serpents, the troop tax for a batallion, a deepstriking squad of wraithguard, and for the sake of discussion a couple of squads of fire dragons to ride in those serpents (even though they're not considered great at the moment.) Throw in some banshees because I play Iybraesil, and they're an iconic unit. Quite a bit of that list will have anti-tank guns. Quite a bit of that list will spend the whole game not firing a shot or swinging an attack.


That just results in things dying faster in general which does nothing to fix the issues with vehicles in 40k, which is that anything without a 4++ save dies too fast because you need that kind of firepower to deal with nasty threats like greater daemons and knights which could show up on your table and cause you trouble if you fail to account for them.

On this, I can see your point. It still feels like a better solution is to tweak mid-strength weapons or anti-tank weapons rather than up the survivability of every tank in the game though. And while it's probably beyond the scope of this conversation, I do agree with you that superheavies don't fit into 40k very well and do unpleasant things to list building and the meta.


I started playing in 5th. I definitely got sick of parking lots. That's a big part of why I tend to be anti-vehicle-immunity in threads like this. I remember feeling like I had to ignore huge swathes of my codex in favor of taking yet another squad of fire dragons because I basically stopped being allowed to interact with the enemy army once my anti-tank ran out. I remember ramming wave serpents into enemy tanks because ramming and a storm guardian with a fusion gun were the last things in my list that could hurt the enemy. It wasn't great.

That sounds like a personal problem and a poorly built list.

Careful. If we're going to start yelling, "Git gud," at each other, then I could say the same thing about your own difficulties with the current rules.
It was, as I recall, partly an eldar problem. Where marines could sprinkle meltaguns and lascannons throughout their army, eldar basically just had fire dragons and whatever brightlance platforms they took (and those hit on 4+ at the time). So if my opponent was fielding heavily armored vehicles, they could pretty much just focus on killing the transports with the dragons or kill the dragons once they got out (at which point the dragons had at least killed something but not necessarily the high AV target I would have preferred). If you took a seer council, you could lean on witchblades to do some heavy lifting. My inner hipster and highschooler budget kept me from fielding that particular unit though.

A lot of eldar lists at the time just had DAVU falcons fly in circles hoping they didn't die until the end of the game. Falcons were silly durable at the time. People hated it. Because unkillable vehicles aren't fun to face.


Eldar tanks are mostly good because they either transport something valuable or carry star cannons. That and they're fast.

So you do concede that there are vehicles in the game that are good despite not having a 4++. And those vehicles can even be transports.


Why are you using bolters and shurikens to kill tanks? Where did your anti-tank go? Why aren't you deepstriking it in turn 2 to prevent it getting shot before it can start cleaning up tanks? If you play better and build a half-way decent TAC list you should be able to kill enough armor that you only stop being able kill them in turns 4 and 5 and should be ahead on objectives at that stage anyway ensuring that you both kill stuff and win.

Typically, i'ts towards the end of the game when there are enemy tanks wandering around that have been hurt but not finished off. Or sometimes it's on turn 2 when my blob of guardians shows up and my opponent's list happens to contain mostly hard targets. Being able to chip the last couple wounds off of a vehicle with shuriken catapults or punch a wounded tank off of an objective with marines isn't a go-to option, but it is something that I generally find myself doing. And being able to take a couple lucky wounds off of a vehicle feels much better than having to accept that I'm no longer allowed to hurt the vehicle.

Believe it or not, I do win games. I'm no GT winner, but I'm not incompetent. Nor do I claim that I can't deal with armored lists. I'm claiming that I've played against armored lists in editions where small arms fire can't interact with them, and it sucked. So please stop implying that I'm an idiot who needs to git gud and build better lists.


Issues like "tyranids struggle against tanks" were a pretty big deal in 5th and are still a pretty big deal now.

We can tune nids to have better options against AV. If GW can make Eradicators, they can make some nasty anti-tank for nids.

Fair. Although aren't eradicators an example of the damage creep you just mentioned wanting to avoid? Either way, you're right. We can make 'nids better against vehicles. We can also do that without first making everyone else worse against tanks.


Actually, overly durable units have been one of the most consistent problems from 40k.

Sometimes, but it was rarely ever tanks causing said issues. It was wound allocation nonsense, FMCs when dedicated anti-flier weaponry was hard to come by, or full on death stars. There were very few metas where a monolith or land raider being too durable was the root of the problem.


Telling people they should just take more anti tank is kind of like telling 7e players that they should just take more psychic defense to deal with the invisible death stars.

Comparing bring back AV to the edition that tried to kill 40k seems a little off the mark.

That's fair. The basic point I was trying to make was, "I feel like your suggestions risk creating imbalanced games where some units are too durable."


Armour facings worked ok for years. To me, what we have now is better. Not perfect, but better.

Tanks being gummed to death by weapons that shouldn't even scratch the paint breaks suspension of disbelief way too much for me to agree.

Ask yourself this, would a realistic military ever field an armored vehicle that could be reliably made to explode by the most common small arms in the galaxy?

I really do see what you mean. I just don't think I see the weapons in question the same way. As you admitted earlier, lasguns aren't a big threat to vehicles. Strength 4+ weapons aren't "common" weapons despite being common on the tabletop. A bolter fires an armor-piercing explosive. It's generally mounted on a tank or wielded by an extremely rare special operative. Shuriken weapons are extremely advanced weapons wielded by a dying species of ninja space wizards. Strength 6+ weapons tend to be even more rare.


ATTENTION
. Psychic tests are unfluffy. Your longing for AV is understandable but misguided. Your chapter doesn't need a separate codex. Doctrines should go away. Being a "troop" means nothing. This has been a cranky service announcement. You may now resume your regularly scheduled arguing.
 
   
Made in it
Waaagh! Ork Warboss




Italy

 Canadian 5th wrote:

Tanks being immune to small arms worked for 7 editions and was never the main complaint in any of them. So why is it suddenly going to be a huge issue now?



Actually people complained a lot about tanks being really squishy in older editions, to the point that in 7th they completely disappeared barring those ones who were really cheap (or free) or those who had invulns.

They were immune to small arms but a single anti tank shot could kill them or at least cripple them badly. All the results from the penetrating hits table were devastating, and a vehicle suffering a single pen was basically useless for at least a full turn.

With orks I never struggled killing vehicles, land raider included. The random power klaws and the single melee specialist unit had no problem in dealing with such targets, I didn't have to fire a single shot against AV14, and in fact orks never had (and still haven't!) efficient guns for those targets. Now tanks are way tougher and outside the tankbustas' gimmick (which needs 6 CPs and 315 points to work) no way I can kill a land raider in a single turn of shooting with average rolls if I bring a reasonable TAC list, let alone a knight, and in combat only dedicated melee specialists can actually harm it. I can't tarpit it anymore either.

Not everyone can actually 1-shot a knight, and outside the Castellan's reign I don't even think it was a necessity to design a list with that amount of anti tank. It certainly isn't now.

Vehicles don't suffer from the actual harm that small arms are able to cause them, they suffer from the infinite dice rolling. Being able to fire 30+ anti tank shots with high BS, re-rolls, and modifiers in a TAC list is bad design. That's the thing that should be fixed. In 5th TAC shooting oriented lists had 12-15ish shots between missiles, meltas and lascannons (or their equivalents) with no re rolls or little access to them.

 
   
Made in ca
Stubborn Dark Angels Veteran Sergeant




Vancouver, BC

Wyldhunt wrote:
For the sake of discussion, let's go with some sort of triple knight or triple repulsor list. Because I've been playing craftworlders lately, let's say I bring something like a guardian defender webway bomb, a few wave serpents, the troop tax for a batallion, a deepstriking squad of wraithguard, and for the sake of discussion a couple of squads of fire dragons to ride in those serpents (even though they're not considered great at the moment.) Throw in some banshees because I play Iybraesil, and they're an iconic unit. Quite a bit of that list will have anti-tank guns. Quite a bit of that list will spend the whole game not firing a shot or swinging an attack.

So what's the issue? Your small arms equipped forces play the mission and act as screens for the long-range anti-tank, this is literally what infantry do IRL. They scout and hold ground while waiting for the big guns to actually kill the enemy. Even when they do shoot it's mostly for suppression to allow themselves to reposition and get to the enemy flank where they can either capture or engage the enemy.

Is a realistic battle where not everything is pushing MAXIMUM DAKKA down range somehow boring to you?

On this, I can see your point. It still feels like a better solution is to tweak mid-strength weapons or anti-tank weapons rather than up the survivability of every tank in the game though. And while it's probably beyond the scope of this conversation, I do agree with you that superheavies don't fit into 40k very well and do unpleasant things to list building and the meta.

The issue with tanks having toughness and saves is that you can't make mid-strength AP-1/-2 weapons bad at killing tanks without also making them bad at killed MEQ, TEQ, and PEQ targets as they need that strength, number of shots, and AP to shift those targets. So you either need to make special rules either for each weapon (unlikely) or for vehicles and monsters that nerf these weapons somehow and that feels like cludged on bloat.



Careful. If we're going to start yelling, "Git gud," at each other, then I could say the same thing about your own difficulties with the current rules.
It was, as I recall, partly an eldar problem. Where marines could sprinkle meltaguns and lascannons throughout their army, eldar basically just had fire dragons and whatever brightlance platforms they took (and those hit on 4+ at the time). So if my opponent was fielding heavily armored vehicles, they could pretty much just focus on killing the transports with the dragons or kill the dragons once they got out (at which point the dragons had at least killed something but not necessarily the high AV target I would have preferred). If you took a seer council, you could lean on witchblades to do some heavy lifting. My inner hipster and highschooler budget kept me from fielding that particular unit though.

Is it wrong of me to assume that units like wraith guard, the avatar, fire prisms, and void cannons were also antitank you could have used but didn't?

A lot of eldar lists at the time just had DAVU falcons fly in circles hoping they didn't die until the end of the game. Falcons were silly durable at the time. People hated it. Because unkillable vehicles aren't fun to face.

People need to realize that 40k isn't just about throwing dice and removing enemy models from the table. Yes, it's fun to carve a swathe of the enemy army from the table each turn, but winning by outlasting the enemy threat should feel just as rewarding because you still used your list to accomplish your goals.


Eldar tanks are mostly good because they either transport something valuable or carry star cannons. That and they're fast.

So you do concede that there are vehicles in the game that are good despite not having a 4++. And those vehicles can even be transports.

Typically, i'ts towards the end of the game when there are enemy tanks wandering around that have been hurt but not finished off. Or sometimes it's on turn 2 when my blob of guardians shows up and my opponent's list happens to contain mostly hard targets. Being able to chip the last couple wounds off of a vehicle with shuriken catapults or punch a wounded tank off of an objective with marines isn't a go-to option, but it is something that I generally find myself doing. And being able to take a couple lucky wounds off of a vehicle feels much better than having to accept that I'm no longer allowed to hurt the vehicle.

This is where we have issues. The vehicle list has to work pretty hard to get to the state where it gets to be immune to your fire. Why is there fun less important than your need to ALWAYS be able to hurt everything with anything?

Fair. Although aren't eradicators an example of the damage creep you just mentioned wanting to avoid? Either way, you're right. We can make 'nids better against vehicles. We can also do that without first making everyone else worse against tanks.

It was more to say that there is nothing inherant to Nids that makes them bad at dealing with armor and that GW could easily fix that if they wanted to. No army needs to be lacking an important tool.

That's fair. The basic point I was trying to make was, "I feel like your suggestions risk creating imbalanced games where some units are too durable."

There should be some 'too durable' units in the game because some players like that slow grinding playstyle where they absorb fire in the early turns and get to shine in later turns when they've dealt with the units that can threaten them. Why is your desire to be able to hurt any unit with any other unit (even if inefficiently) more important than, for example, a death guard players fantasy to being exceptionally durable?

I really do see what you mean. I just don't think I see the weapons in question the same way. As you admitted earlier, lasguns aren't a big threat to vehicles. Strength 4+ weapons aren't "common" weapons despite being common on the tabletop. A bolter fires an armor-piercing explosive. It's generally mounted on a tank or wielded by an extremely rare special operative. Shuriken weapons are extremely advanced weapons wielded by a dying species of ninja space wizards. Strength 6+ weapons tend to be even more rare.

Except that the guard will literally have trillions of heavy bolters, grenade launchers, mortars, lascannons, and missile launchers just from their heavy weapons teams. Let alone Specialist weapons, light and cheap vehicles with multi-lasers, krak grenades, melta bombs, etc. So designers would have to account for those and design armor that can shrug off those hits or else design it to be cheap and mobile enough to replace when they're destroyed.

Just look at real-life armor design to see why you can't ignore even outdated and 'uncommon' light anti-tank weapons in your armor design.

 Blackie wrote:
Actually people complained a lot about tanks being really squishy in older editions, to the point that in 7th they completely disappeared barring those ones who were really cheap (or free) or those who had invulns.

As I recall, it tended to go back and forth between editions with tanks often going from durable one edition to paper the next as GW swung balance wildly back and forth. For a best of both worlds approach you could go with AV, hull points, but only allow for penetrating damage once all hull points have been removed. This keeps the advantages of AV with the advantages of current wounds.

This message was edited 2 times. Last update was at 2020/09/14 02:11:46


 
   
Made in us
Fixture of Dakka





 Canadian 5th wrote:

Is a realistic battle where not everything is pushing MAXIMUM DAKKA down range somehow boring to you?

It becomes boring if the second half of the game becomes my opponent wailing on me while I wait to see if I roll saves well enough to get a congratulatory ribbon at the end. I love that cheap, not terribly killy units have a role now, but I still want to be punching back throughout the game.


The issue with tanks having toughness and saves is that you can't make mid-strength AP-1/-2 weapons bad at killing tanks without also making them bad at killed MEQ, TEQ, and PEQ targets as they need that strength, number of shots, and AP to shift those targets. So you either need to make special rules either for each weapon (unlikely) or for vehicles and monsters that nerf these weapons somehow and that feels like cludged on bloat.

Wouldn't most strength 6 and 7 weapons actually be pretty bad against T8 vehicles if we reduced all the buffs in the game? Plasma looks a lot less appealing when 2 overcharged shots have a 1/3rd chance of killing their wielder. Star cannons are good but not amazing at killing land raiders if I can't reroll to-wound rolls with them. Disintegrators without the writ of the living muse scare a leman russ, but you need quite a few of them to actually kill one.


Is it wrong of me to assume that units like wraith guard, the avatar, fire prisms, and void cannons were also antitank you could have used but didn't?

You'd be right to assume those options existed and usually didn't get used. You'd be wrong to think that those options were very good at killing tanks. D-Cannons have and had a 24" range, so your opponent had to walk into their area of control for them to shoot you. And that meant your opponent could usually just kill them from afar in the early turns to prevent them from doing anything. Prisms had a single strength 9 AP2 small blast shot. So against a land raider, you had to roll a 5+ on your armor pen roll to hurt it. Against something like a rhino, you'd hurt it on a 2+, but you'd probably just be shaking or stunning it or maybe knocking off a gun if you were lucky. The avatar killed tanks if he ever touched them. He generally did not because he was a T6 monstrous creature with 4 wounds and a 3+ armor save. He was also an expensive model that you sort of had to build a list around ("elfzilla"), so your opponent could generally just sit back and gun down the expensive model before it ever reached them. Wraithguard could work pretty well, but again, they were expensive, and you had to build a list around them. You couldn't splash them into a vanilla eldar list and let them fix your anti-tank woes.


A lot of eldar lists at the time just had DAVU falcons fly in circles hoping they didn't die until the end of the game. Falcons were silly durable at the time. People hated it. Because unkillable vehicles aren't fun to face.

People need to realize that 40k isn't just about throwing dice and removing enemy models from the table. Yes, it's fun to carve a swathe of the enemy army from the table each turn, but winning by outlasting the enemy threat should feel just as rewarding because you still used your list to accomplish your goals.

In this case, moving flatout for 5 turns instead of shooting and then hoping the game ended on the turn jumped on an objective was not rewarding. It was neither interesting gameplay nor a good fit for the fluff. It was basically just 5 turns of your opponent complaining about how annoyingly durable the falcons were while you agreed and tried to point out that you didn't really have any other way of keeping your squishy troops alive until the end of the game. (Only troops could score objectives as you'll recall.)



Eldar tanks are mostly good because they either transport something valuable or carry star cannons. That and they're fast.

So you do concede that there are vehicles in the game that are good despite not having a 4++. And those vehicles can even be transports.

This bit was left in but doesn't appear to have been responded to. Did you want to respond to it? I feel it's pretty relevant to your stance.

This is where we have issues. The vehicle list has to work pretty hard to get to the state where it gets to be immune to your fire. Why is there fun less important than your need to ALWAYS be able to hurt everything with anything?

The issue there is that my opponent's fun is dependent on me no longer being able to participate in some of the core mechanics of the activity. It's like if you and I played basketball, but you weren't allowed to make baskets in the second half of the game. Some people might enjoy a twist like that, but you see how that might not appeal to most people.


It was more to say that there is nothing inherant to Nids that makes them bad at dealing with armor and that GW could easily fix that if they wanted to. No army needs to be lacking an important tool.
Got it. Fair.


There should be some 'too durable' units in the game because some players like that slow grinding playstyle where they absorb fire in the early turns and get to shine in later turns when they've dealt with the units that can threaten them. Why is your desire to be able to hurt any unit with any other unit (even if inefficiently) more important than, for example, a death guard players fantasy to being exceptionally durable?

The thing is, I'm still allowed to hurt that death guard army. To continue stretching my poor analogy, Death Guard say I'm only allowed to go for three-pointers in the second half of the basketball game. It changes how the game is played, but I'm still allowed to do all the standard basketball things (like shooting baskets.)


Except that the guard will literally have trillions of heavy bolters, grenade launchers, mortars, lascannons, and missile launchers just from their heavy weapons teams. Let alone Specialist weapons, light and cheap vehicles with multi-lasers, krak grenades, melta bombs, etc. So designers would have to account for those and design armor that can shrug off those hits or else design it to be cheap and mobile enough to replace when they're destroyed.

Just look at real-life armor design to see why you can't ignore even outdated and 'uncommon' light anti-tank weapons in your armor design.

I think I'm losing track of your point. In the fluff, I'm sure my eldar would love to make wave serpents that are literally immune to anything short of a lascannon. But one of the core conceits of the setting is that the various playable factions have the means to blow each other up. The weapons that can be taken in a list are weapons that the factions use in-universe because in-universe they can damage the enemy. I shouldn't be able to ignore 2/3rds of my opponent's army because I opted to spam wave serpents while he opted to run a well-rounded vanilla army. Games that you lose against skew lists because they just stat checked you tend to not be very entertaining. For me, at least. And I think many people agree.


 Blackie wrote:
Actually people complained a lot about tanks being really squishy in older editions, to the point that in 7th they completely disappeared barring those ones who were really cheap (or free) or those who had invulns.

As I recall, it tended to go back and forth between editions with tanks often going from durable one edition to paper the next as GW swung balance wildly back and forth. For a best of both worlds approach you could go with AV, hull points, but only allow for penetrating damage once all hull points have been removed. This keeps the advantages of AV with the advantages of current wounds.

Counter-pitch: Get rid of the vehicle damage chart. Give dedicated anti-tank weapons the "anti-tank" keyword. If those weapons meet some criteria (let's say dealing 6 damage in a single shot), you roll on the vehicle damage chart. And then have that chart look something like:

1-2: Stunned; the vehicle may only move half speed and may not shoot until the end of the next player turn.
3-4: Weapon Destroyed; the vehicle may not fire a weapon of the attacker's choice for the rest of the game.
5-6: Immobilized; the vehicle may not move for the rest of the game.

^Chart probably needs work, but you get the idea. This would give dedicated anti-tank guns an advantage over strength 6/7 guns without directly increasing their lethality. You could even go a step further and let some units remove the permanent effects as an action. Gives you more reason to take cheap, non-lethal units and potentially gives a job to things like tech priests that you might otherwise leave out of your list.

You could also maybe just slap a couple extra wounds on most vehicles so that mid-strength-low-damage guns take out a lower percentage of the vehicle's overall health. Pairs well with rules that up the average damage of anti-tank guns (like giving +2 damage to meltas within half range.)


ATTENTION
. Psychic tests are unfluffy. Your longing for AV is understandable but misguided. Your chapter doesn't need a separate codex. Doctrines should go away. Being a "troop" means nothing. This has been a cranky service announcement. You may now resume your regularly scheduled arguing.
 
   
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Ugh, no please, the old damage chart was terrible. Having a vehicle useless because of one successful shot is the opposite of "fixing" vehicles, it will make them bad again. I appreciate the current chart, with stats degrading, a lot more.

IMHO a reasonable fix to give high S weapons a proper role against appropriate targets, along with the removal of buffs and auras for shooting units, could be the Anti-Tank keyword to dedicated anti tank weapons. The effect would be +1 to wound and/or +1D or both against vehicles and monsters. Weapons without the keyword will get -1 to wound and -1D (to a minimum of 1) instead.

This way heavy bolters could still damage vehicles but not efficiently and certainly without stripping 2W with each shot that goes through saves as GW will soon buff them to 2D making them a lot more useful against vehicles and monsters and it doesn't seem fair.

 
   
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What about if we Ghazzified vehicles?

For those out of the know on Orks, Ghazkull has a rule which prevents him from losing more than 4 wounds per phase. This is because he would otherwise just get hosed down by everyone due to hit high wound count.

As it's an established method for keeping a survivable unit alive, what about if we could adapt it somehow to make vehicles more survivable?
Maybe have it that a vehicle cannot be reduced by more than 2 damage brackets per turn? Meaning you will need 2 turns to kill any vehicles which have brackets (unless there are any out there with 2 brackets or 5+). Maybe enforce that the last bracket will always have a maximum of 6 wounds in it (I don't think many will need adapting for this) and then declare that the final bracket cannot be used unless it is done so in a single attack, assuming the vehicle started in the top bracket.

EG if a vehicle has 3 brackets:
12-18 W
7-11 W
1-6 W
if the model started the turn in the top bracket, then any guns can bring it down to 6 wounds (just into the lowest bracket) but it cannot lose any more wounds unless it is hit by a 6 damage weapon - you might be able to blow it up entirely.

If it starts in the second bracket then it can be destroyed as normal.

It'd need writing in a less garbled manner but it could work for increasing survival... Though simply stopping half-strength weapons from working, increasing toughness and decreasing wounds would work. A landraider with T14 and 10 wounds, immune to S7 or lower guns and with lascannons wounding on 5's and doing D6 damage would be pretty good still. The only reason vehicles have so many wounds is because they have to survive the massed small-arms fire.

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Ghazifying vehicles is an interesting approach. If our goal is to strengthen dedicated AT weapons' niche compared to strength6/7 "generalist" weapons, I'm not sure if that accomplishes said goal.

Trying to finish off that last bracket seems like it potentially becomes a bit of a trap/gamble if the last bracket is, in fact, 6W. You could poor all of your d6 damage shots into the enemy vehicle hoping for a lucky 6 rather than putting those shots towards whittling down a second target. I feel like most players in that scenario would just put their last few shots into a different target rather than fishing for 6s.

Which means that between mid-strength weapons that reliably do SOME damage and high-strength d6 damage weapons that are a little less reliable but prone to spiking their damage, the winner is probably the more reliable weapons. You just plan around needing two turns to kill a vehicle, and then you go with the option that will reliably be able to take out at least half the vehicle's health and reliably kill through the last bracket on the following turn.

But I'm thinking about this in terms of 6W final brackets. Maybe it's okay given that most vehicles have like, 4 wounds for their final bracket? Fishing for a 4+ on a lascannon's damage is very different from fishing for a 6.


ATTENTION
. Psychic tests are unfluffy. Your longing for AV is understandable but misguided. Your chapter doesn't need a separate codex. Doctrines should go away. Being a "troop" means nothing. This has been a cranky service announcement. You may now resume your regularly scheduled arguing.
 
   
Made in gb
Longtime Dakkanaut




The other probably more controversial option is Giving vehicals a -1 to wound ability.

Lasguns etc still wound on 6's due to the 6's succeed rule in the BRB, but bolters & Heavybolter's etc goes from 5's to 6's and even Melta goes from 3+ to 4+ etc. But it would really help the distance between S4-6 and S7+. Especially if their is less rerolls around

HB goes from 39% wound rate to 20% with reroll1's vrs a Multi Melta going from 58% to 39% vrs T8 and 78% to 58% vrs T7 or less.
   
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If the goal is to truly strengthen anti-tank weaponry then you need to increase the damage averages of tank-hunting weapons. A lascannon could be damage 2D3 instead of D6, or even 3D3.

But I return to the fact that, if small-arms couldn't hurt them, tanks wouldn't need so many wounds. And if they had less wounds, high strength high damage weapons would be both necessary and effective. a lascannon rolling 6 damage against a landraider who has 8 wounds and relies on being T14, thus shrugging off anything below S8 without being hurt, would be pretty effective. Ork trukks being T8, so needing S5+, rhinos T10, so needing S6+, russes being T12, needing S7+, etc. Drop some edge-case weapons (autocannons and their ilk) to S6 and you create a minimum requirement to kill a vehicle. Then trukks can roll around with 5 wounds instead of 10, and knights can have 12 wounds, so 2 exceptionally lucky hits from lascannons could do the job.

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I am Thoruk, the Barbarian, Slayer of Ducks, and This is my blog!

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I also make designs for t-shirts and mugs and such on Redbubble! 
   
Made in us
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There was a gradual creep from edition to edition, towards "HP".
-In 4th edition, a Penetrating hit would destroy a vehicle on a 4+.
-In 5th ed, a Penetrating hit would destroy a vehicle on a 5+, but AP 1 added +1 to the roll.
-In 6th ed, a Penetrating hit would destroy a vehicle on a 6+, but AP 2 added +1 to the roll and AP 1 added +2 instead.
-And in 7th, that damage chart was further downgraded, so you needed a 7+ to destroy a vehicle.

Basically, before 8th, 4th-7th required you to roll "The edition+" to get the OHKO. That said, 6th/7th definitely put more emphasis on "weight of fire" and stuff like Scatter Lasers/Autocannons/Deathspinners/High-Yield Missile Pods/etc, instead of what 'should' have been dedicated AT. (And of course, this isn't even discussing how 7th was 'lol-Grav' and it only took one 'lucky' 6 to immobilize a vehicle, and two to wreck it outright, since most vehicles had '3' hullpoints, and the 'second' 6 would thus strip an additional one.)

Ultimately, it depends on what direction vehicles should go in. But that brings up the old debates about how 7th -> 8th removed Tank Shock, weapon arcs, immobilization, stunning/shaking vehicles, etc. Now, another option could be that vehicles simply reroll their armor saves by default; call it Reinforced, after the old rule from Epic, and have it so that the save modifier impacts both armor saving rolls.
   
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Vancouver, BC

Wyldhunt wrote:
It becomes boring if the second half of the game becomes my opponent wailing on me while I wait to see if I roll saves well enough to get a congratulatory ribbon at the end. I love that cheap, not terribly killy units have a role now, but I still want to be punching back throughout the game.

Winning the game is a consolation ribbon at the end?!?

Wouldn't most strength 6 and 7 weapons actually be pretty bad against T8 vehicles if we reduced all the buffs in the game? Plasma looks a lot less appealing when 2 overcharged shots have a 1/3rd chance of killing their wielder. Star cannons are good but not amazing at killing land raiders if I can't reroll to-wound rolls with them. Disintegrators without the writ of the living muse scare a leman russ, but you need quite a few of them to actually kill one.

Not especially. Lascannons and the like now have a far greater chance to just whiff and 4++ saves and 5+++ just become impossible to wear down at all.

You'd be right to assume those options existed and usually didn't get used. You'd be wrong to think that those options were very good at killing tanks. D-Cannons have and had a 24" range, so your opponent had to walk into their area of control for them to shoot you. And that meant your opponent could usually just kill them from afar in the early turns to prevent them from doing anything. Prisms had a single strength 9 AP2 small blast shot. So against a land raider, you had to roll a 5+ on your armor pen roll to hurt it. Against something like a rhino, you'd hurt it on a 2+, but you'd probably just be shaking or stunning it or maybe knocking off a gun if you were lucky. The avatar killed tanks if he ever touched them. He generally did not because he was a T6 monstrous creature with 4 wounds and a 3+ armor save. He was also an expensive model that you sort of had to build a list around ("elfzilla"), so your opponent could generally just sit back and gun down the expensive model before it ever reached them. Wraithguard could work pretty well, but again, they were expensive, and you had to build a list around them. You couldn't splash them into a vanilla eldar list and let them fix your anti-tank woes.

I never said you could, just that Eldar had anti-tank options if they chose to build around them and could play the mission if they didn't want to bring such a list.

In this case, moving flatout for 5 turns instead of shooting and then hoping the game ended on the turn jumped on an objective was not rewarding. It was neither interesting gameplay nor a good fit for the fluff. It was basically just 5 turns of your opponent complaining about how annoyingly durable the falcons were while you agreed and tried to point out that you didn't really have any other way of keeping your squishy troops alive until the end of the game. (Only troops could score objectives as you'll recall.)

That's not amazingly fun, but there's a balance between that and vehicles dying reliably to heavy bolters.

This bit was left in but doesn't appear to have been responded to. Did you want to respond to it? I feel it's pretty relevant to your stance.

The main issue I have with vehicles is that anything that relies on being tough just sucks. The good vehicles either kill too much for their point cost, act as transports, or have some other niche. I'll go more into this at the bottom of my post as I sum up my issue with vehicles as they are now.

The issue there is that my opponent's fun is dependent on me no longer being able to participate in some of the core mechanics of the activity. It's like if you and I played basketball, but you weren't allowed to make baskets in the second half of the game. Some people might enjoy a twist like that, but you see how that might not appeal to most people.

It's doubtful that your opponent will have *nothing* left that you can hurt at the end of a game. So it might be more hunkering down than you'd ideally want, but by the same token, you probably won't face many skew lists if you can win just by hunkering down on an objective and expecting that they won't have enough firepower to move you. The ideal is that you can bring a tough vehicle with a purpose to complement a strategy not that taking unkillable vehicles becomes the entire strategy.

The thing is, I'm still allowed to hurt that death guard army. To continue stretching my poor analogy, Death Guard say I'm only allowed to go for three-pointers in the second half of the basketball game. It changes how the game is played, but I'm still allowed to do all the standard basketball things (like shooting baskets.)

That you are and you still get to hurt 'unkillable' tanks if you can keep your sources of anti-tank alive. Now you just play a mini-game where the enemy tries to kill your AT early and you try to protect it until the game goes late.

I think I'm losing track of your point. In the fluff, I'm sure my eldar would love to make wave serpents that are literally immune to anything short of a lascannon. But one of the core conceits of the setting is that the various playable factions have the means to blow each other up. The weapons that can be taken in a list are weapons that the factions use in-universe because in-universe they can damage the enemy. I shouldn't be able to ignore 2/3rds of my opponent's army because I opted to spam wave serpents while he opted to run a well-rounded vanilla army. Games that you lose against skew lists because they just stat checked you tend to not be very entertaining. For me, at least. And I think many people agree.

In such a universe nobody would focus on armor at all. If literally any grot with a glock can kill your tanks, and the current rules do allow for this, you simply wouldn't build tanks as we know them and you certainly wouldn't use them on the front line the way they've been used since WWI. You'd design artillery platforms that hide behind cover, light scout vehicles, and the like and the lack of a line-breaking vehicle means you end up with very static warfare as pushing into a defended position becomes very difficult.

-----

Ignoring the quote spaghetti above let me make my points about vehicles clear:

1) Armor shouldn't be hurt by the standard infantry weapons of the universe it was designed to fight in. Period.
2) Vehicles shouldn't behave like infantry or monstrous creatures. Nor should monstrous creatures feel like infantry with more wounds.
3) Vehicles should degrade in interesting ways where various bits of them fail as they take fire. Monstrous creatures should degrade using current wound brackets to show a gradual weakening of the beast as it nears death.
4) Tough vehicles should have a role where it's okay for them not to have firepower because their other traits, transport capacity, ability to block a lane for multiple turns, should provide enough value to make them worth using.

To this end, I would keep wounds/hull points if I were designing a new AV system. I would also put them before the damage chart to represent ablative armour, active defences, shots that simply didn't hit anything important, etc. So a Land Raider might have half it's current wounds in hull points defended by 14 AV all-around, forcing the enemy to heavily focus it with anti-tank to get a turn 1 kill. To balance this, vehicle repair would only fix damage chart results and not restore wounds/hull points.

I might also consider a variation of the current explodes rules for 'closed-top' transports where on a 6 it explodes as normal, on a 4 or 5 the crew has to bail out immediately using the current rules, and on anything else, the passengers may stay in the tank until they are forced to disembark at the start of their next movement phase. This would make closed transports more appealing even with the charging restrictions they have. Open topped vehicles would allow for charges out of them and passengers firing out of they could benefit from special rules as if they were disembarked to give them a unique advantage.

Finally, weapon facings, tank shock, bog tests and the like would all be coming back.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2020/09/18 00:39:59


 
   
Made in us
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 Canadian 5th wrote:

Ignoring the quote spaghetti above let me make my points about vehicles clear:

Fair enough. Confining my responses to this section in the interest of making our quotes more manageable.


1) Armor shouldn't be hurt by the standard infantry weapons of the universe it was designed to fight in. Period.

Makes sense from a simulationist angle. Wasn't fun to deal with in practice back in 5th. You prioritize simulationism more than I do, and that's all well and good. Personally, I'm willing to suspend my disbelief enough to let lasers, alien ninja star guns, and armor piercing rpg rounds do a small amount of damage to a vehicle.


2) Vehicles shouldn't behave like infantry or monstrous creatures. Nor should monstrous creatures feel like infantry with more wounds.
3) Vehicles should degrade in interesting ways where various bits of them fail as they take fire. Monstrous creatures should degrade using current wound brackets to show a gradual weakening of the beast as it nears death.

I don't necessarily disagree with that, but I do find point 3 kind of interesting. Thinking about the old vehicle damage table, are there effects on there that you feel don't make sense for 40k monstrous creatures? I feel like a tyranid could have a biocannon blasted off as easily as a chimera could. Shooting the legs off of a wraith lord or carnifex seems like it might basically immobilize them. A krak missile to the chest or head seems like it could shake or stun a living creature.


4) Tough vehicles should have a role where it's okay for them not to have firepower because their other traits, transport capacity, ability to block a lane for multiple turns, should provide enough value to make them worth using.

Don't necessarily disagree as long as that's not code for, "and that's why my opponent shouldn't be allowed to hurt my units." XD A rhino should embody this right? Its shooting isn't amazing, but it should be able to deliver a unit inside to the front lines without weathering a bunch of enemy fire on the way there.


To this end, I would keep wounds/hull points if I were designing a new AV system. I would also put them before the damage chart to represent ablative armour, active defences, shots that simply didn't hit anything important, etc. So a Land Raider might have half it's current wounds in hull points defended by 14 AV all-around, forcing the enemy to heavily focus it with anti-tank to get a turn 1 kill. To balance this, vehicle repair would only fix damage chart results and not restore wounds/hull points.

So basically what we have now, but strength 7 and less isn't allowed to hurt the land raider? Or am I missing something? If I'm reading this right, doesn't this make vehicles more durable than in editions where AV was a thing? When I played in 5th-7th, half my army couldn't hurt a land raider, but at least my first lucky bright lance might kill the land raider on its own. With this, half my army can't hurt the land raider, and also I need a minimum of 3 (average of 5) unsaved bright lances to get through to kill it?

Average damage on a d6 is 3.5, 3.5 x 5 = 17.5 (as opposed to 3.5 X 4 = 14). For easier and more generous math, we'll assume the land raider fails all of its 6+ saves, so 5 unsaved lances means 10 to-wound rolls (wounds on a 4+). 10 to-wound rolls means about 14 shots (2/3rds of 14 is about 9.3). Is 14 shots a reasonable ask to average a dead land raider? If you wanted to do it in one turn, you'd be looking at 5 ravagers (15 shots) costing 725 points to do the job. And that's with AP -4 weapons. Armies relying on krak missiles (same strength and damage, but you get a 4+ armor save against it) will do quite a bit worse. It makes things like meltaguns and lascannons kind of mandatory, and that means you're probably skipping a bunch of other options to make sure you hit your melta/las quota.

Unless I'm totally misunderstanding your pitch.


I might also consider a variation of the current explodes rules for 'closed-top' transports where on a 6 it explodes as normal, on a 4 or 5 the crew has to bail out immediately using the current rules, and on anything else, the passengers may stay in the tank until they are forced to disembark at the start of their next movement phase. This would make closed transports more appealing even with the charging restrictions they have. Open topped vehicles would allow for charges out of them and passengers firing out of they could benefit from special rules as if they were disembarked to give them a unique advantage.

I could get behind some version of this. Would it be unreasonable to just let passengers disembark but not charge in the same turn the way the impulsor does? Or let them disembark and charge if the vehicles only moved up to 6"?


Finally, weapon facings, tank shock, bog tests and the like would all be coming back.

Eh, again, I feel like that's better simulationism but worse gameplay. And again, to each their own. I don't miss awkward weapon facings, especially on tanks that frequently couldn't target enemies right in front of them because of awkward sponson angles or on odd ducks like the voidweaver that had to shoot one of its guns backwards. Weapon facings also suddenly turn a bunch of innocent model conversions into "modeling for advantage."

Tank shocks were always the notoriously confusing and problematic rules of the game. I think of them alongside the D&D 3.5 grappling rules. Most people didn't understand them, you often spent a lot of time trying to interpret them or explain them to your opponent, they usually didn't really do much, and when they did manage to do something (like force a unit to run off the table), opponents generally ended up having a frustrating experience.

Not sure what you mean by a "bog" test unless you mean a difficult terrain test that rendered your transports useless 1 out of 6 times that they had the audacity to roll over the base of a ruin. I'm pretty sure that particular rule was on a lot of players' top 5 least favorite rules lists.


ATTENTION
. Psychic tests are unfluffy. Your longing for AV is understandable but misguided. Your chapter doesn't need a separate codex. Doctrines should go away. Being a "troop" means nothing. This has been a cranky service announcement. You may now resume your regularly scheduled arguing.
 
   
Made in ca
Stubborn Dark Angels Veteran Sergeant




Vancouver, BC

Wyldhunt wrote:
Makes sense from a simulationist angle. Wasn't fun to deal with in practice back in 5th. You prioritize simulationism more than I do, and that's all well and good. Personally, I'm willing to suspend my disbelief enough to let lasers, alien ninja star guns, and armor piercing rpg rounds do a small amount of damage to a vehicle.

*Nods* We can agree to disagree on how important simulation is to enjoyment.

I don't necessarily disagree with that, but I do find point 3 kind of interesting. Thinking about the old vehicle damage table, are there effects on there that you feel don't make sense for 40k monstrous creatures? I feel like a tyranid could have a biocannon blasted off as easily as a chimera could. Shooting the legs off of a wraith lord or carnifex seems like it might basically immobilize them. A krak missile to the chest or head seems like it could shake or stun a living creature.

You could do that. My reason for not doing so is to make them distinct from vehicles and because I like the bracketing model as a means of doing that.

Don't necessarily disagree as long as that's not code for, "and that's why my opponent shouldn't be allowed to hurt my units." XD A rhino should embody this right? Its shooting isn't amazing, but it should be able to deliver a unit inside to the front lines without weathering a bunch of enemy fire on the way there.

I don't consider a vehicle 'tough' if it can be damaged by anti-infantry weapons. So Rhinos, aren't tough so much as they are the basic unit of transport for an army. They always died to assault cannons and plasma but if they got your dudes 12" up the field or ate part of an aplha strike first they did their job. Also, AV14 was never you don't get to hurt my units, it was always, let's make sure my opponent has to actually bring anti-tank to hurt my units.

So basically what we have now, but strength 7 and less isn't allowed to hurt the land raider? Or am I missing something? If I'm reading this right, doesn't this make vehicles more durable than in editions where AV was a thing? When I played in 5th-7th, half my army couldn't hurt a land raider, but at least my first lucky bright lance might kill the land raider on its own. With this, half my army can't hurt the land raider, and also I need a minimum of 3 (average of 5) unsaved bright lances to get through to kill it?

It does, but as other posters have pointed out armour (certain flying tanks aside) has always felt weak to some players just because it could die to very few hits. Also, half your army shouldn't be able to hurt an LR and it should pay for that privilege and unique stat line.

Average damage on a d6 is 3.5, 3.5 x 5 = 17.5 (as opposed to 3.5 X 4 = 14). For easier and more generous math, we'll assume the land raider fails all of its 6+ saves, so 5 unsaved lances means 10 to-wound rolls (wounds on a 4+). 10 to-wound rolls means about 14 shots (2/3rds of 14 is about 9.3). Is 14 shots a reasonable ask to average a dead land raider? If you wanted to do it in one turn, you'd be looking at 5 ravagers (15 shots) costing 725 points to do the job. And that's with AP -4 weapons. Armies relying on krak missiles (same strength and damage, but you get a 4+ armor save against it) will do quite a bit worse. It makes things like meltaguns and lascannons kind of mandatory, and that means you're probably skipping a bunch of other options to make sure you hit your melta/las quota.

Your math is wrong given that I said vehicles would have hull points equal to half their current wounds. So you'd only need to deal 8 damage before any further hits would hit the vehicle damage chart at which point any unsaved wound could kill said vehicle.

If that still ends up being too punitive you could reduce a vehicle's AV by 1 on all facings once it's hull points have been depleted as the damage means more weak points have been exposed.

I could get behind some version of this. Would it be unreasonable to just let passengers disembark but not charge in the same turn the way the impulsor does? Or let them disembark and charge if the vehicles only moved up to 6"?

My thought was that closed transports are more protective so they get a bonus of, potentially, providing an extra round of cover for their passengers after they're destroyed. Open topped vehicles get more offence letting their passengers shoot and charge out of them.

Eh, again, I feel like that's better simulationism but worse gameplay. And again, to each their own. I don't miss awkward weapon facings, especially on tanks that frequently couldn't target enemies right in front of them because of awkward sponson angles or on odd ducks like the voidweaver that had to shoot one of its guns backwards. Weapon facings also suddenly turn a bunch of innocent model conversions into "modeling for advantage."

That made vehicles more unique, which I like, and also made positioning far more important as if you wanted to shoot something you needed to make sure your vehicle could actually do so. Just be glad I have brought up ideas like vehicles having to wheel to turn to bring us properly back to the RPG like sim aspects of past editions.

Tank shocks were always the notoriously confusing and problematic rules of the game. I think of them alongside the D&D 3.5 grappling rules. Most people didn't understand them, you often spent a lot of time trying to interpret them or explain them to your opponent, they usually didn't really do much, and when they did manage to do something (like force a unit to run off the table), opponents generally ended up having a frustrating experience.

Tank makes a charge. You move all your models out of its way using the shortest movement possible and then either nominate a model to make a last stand or not. It wasn't that tough and allowed skilled players to bunch up enemy models to hit them with nasty things like flamer templates. Burnboyz in a BW anyone?

Not sure what you mean by a "bog" test unless you mean a difficult terrain test that rendered your transports useless 1 out of 6 times that they had the audacity to roll over the base of a ruin. I'm pretty sure that particular rule was on a lot of players' top 5 least favorite rules lists.

Vehicles get stuck. Plan around it or buy dozer blades.
   
Made in gb
Longtime Dakkanaut






I wonder if it would be overkill to equate the Hull points to vehicle systems, and have hits randomise where they put their damage.

So vehicles have 3 sections - Drive, Weapons and Crew - which degrade as they lose wounds. When all 3 are gone, the vehicle is destroyed.

The chart below shows a rough idea of what I'm suggesting. So each section of the Battlewagon has 7 wounds, totaling 21, so more than current. If a lascannon hits it, you randomise (roll a D3) to see which bit it hit (after saves etc have been resolved). you roll a 2, so the Weapons are hit, and then you roll 4 damage. The weapon system degrades, reducing the maximum weapons which can be used each turn to 1.
If a second hit also hits the weapon system and reduces it to 0 wounds, the weapon systems are offline and further hits are randomised between the other 2 systems.
Alternatively you could have a hull wounds which is only hit if you roll up a system which is already destroyed. So the vehicle has, say, 5 wounds, but they cannot be removed unless you first kill one section of the vehicle (EG drive) and then hit Drive again.
Mortal wounds would either carry over between sections or carry over into the vehicles Hull.
[Thumb - vehicle dmg.JPG]


12,300 points of Orks
9th W/D/L with Orks, 4/0/2
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 Canadian 5th wrote:

Average damage on a d6 is 3.5, 3.5 x 5 = 17.5 (as opposed to 3.5 X 4 = 14). For easier and more generous math, we'll assume the land raider fails all of its 6+ saves, so 5 unsaved lances means 10 to-wound rolls (wounds on a 4+). 10 to-wound rolls means about 14 shots (2/3rds of 14 is about 9.3). Is 14 shots a reasonable ask to average a dead land raider? If you wanted to do it in one turn, you'd be looking at 5 ravagers (15 shots) costing 725 points to do the job. And that's with AP -4 weapons. Armies relying on krak missiles (same strength and damage, but you get a 4+ armor save against it) will do quite a bit worse. It makes things like meltaguns and lascannons kind of mandatory, and that means you're probably skipping a bunch of other options to make sure you hit your melta/las quota.

Your math is wrong given that I said vehicles would have hull points equal to half their current wounds. So you'd only need to deal 8 damage before any further hits would hit the vehicle damage chart at which point any unsaved wound could kill said vehicle.

If that still ends up being too punitive you could reduce a vehicle's AV by 1 on all facings once it's hull points have been depleted as the damage means more weak points have been exposed.

Ah. Got it. I misread your pitch. I could see something like that working. I don't prefer it on paper to what we have now, but it would work. It wouldn't take an unreasonable number of high damage shots to get through most vehicles using those rules; you'd just be stuck in a feelsbad moment if you faced a skew list and didn't pack a ton of AT.


Tank makes a charge. You move all your models out of its way using the shortest movement possible and then either nominate a model to make a last stand or not. It wasn't that tough and allowed skilled players to bunch up enemy models to hit them with nasty things like flamer templates. Burnboyz in a BW anyone?

A lot of the confusion came from trying to figure out if a unit was destroyed by a tank shock. How exactly that worked mutated over time, but you may recall players forming specific shapes with their vehicles in their opponent's deployment zone to autokill units due to weird rules interactions.

I'd also worry about a tank-heavy list completely shutting down their opponent's primary objectives by tank shocking onto them every turn. Especially if those tanks became harder to remove.


Vehicles get stuck. Plan around it or buy dozer blades.

Well, not everyone had dozer blades back in the day, and they were kind of an auto-take for those who did. Assuming you gave all vehicles access to them, they'd kind of just become a points tax to ignore bog tests. Which makes me feel like bog tests shouldn't be a thing. Might be a fun include in a vehicle-focused variant of 40k though (like Spearhead).


Automatically Appended Next Post:
 some bloke wrote:
I wonder if it would be overkill to equate the Hull points to vehicle systems, and have hits randomise where they put their damage.

So vehicles have 3 sections - Drive, Weapons and Crew - which degrade as they lose wounds. When all 3 are gone, the vehicle is destroyed.

The chart below shows a rough idea of what I'm suggesting. So each section of the Battlewagon has 7 wounds, totaling 21, so more than current. If a lascannon hits it, you randomise (roll a D3) to see which bit it hit (after saves etc have been resolved). you roll a 2, so the Weapons are hit, and then you roll 4 damage. The weapon system degrades, reducing the maximum weapons which can be used each turn to 1.
If a second hit also hits the weapon system and reduces it to 0 wounds, the weapon systems are offline and further hits are randomised between the other 2 systems.
Alternatively you could have a hull wounds which is only hit if you roll up a system which is already destroyed. So the vehicle has, say, 5 wounds, but they cannot be removed unless you first kill one section of the vehicle (EG drive) and then hit Drive again.
Mortal wounds would either carry over between sections or carry over into the vehicles Hull.


That could be fun. You could even go so far as to customize the likelihood of hitting various systems on different vehicles or take wargear that interacted with specific systems. It might be more at-home in the aforementioned vehicle-focused variant game though. You'd be looking at bookkeeping 3 or 4 wound tracks per vehicle. That's totally the sort of thing I'd want to keep track of in a vehicle duel. I just wouldn't want to add that much record keeping to a normal 40k game.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2020/09/18 22:51:04



ATTENTION
. Psychic tests are unfluffy. Your longing for AV is understandable but misguided. Your chapter doesn't need a separate codex. Doctrines should go away. Being a "troop" means nothing. This has been a cranky service announcement. You may now resume your regularly scheduled arguing.
 
   
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Stubborn Dark Angels Veteran Sergeant




Vancouver, BC

Wyldhunt wrote:
Ah. Got it. I misread your pitch. I could see something like that working. I don't prefer it on paper to what we have now, but it would work. It wouldn't take an unreasonable number of high damage shots to get through most vehicles using those rules; you'd just be stuck in a feelsbad moment if you faced a skew list and didn't pack a ton of AT.

Yeah, my goal isn't to make vehicles OP. It's to make them more interesting while selling the fantasy that armor matters amidst a game where people think that things die too fast.

A lot of the confusion came from trying to figure out if a unit was destroyed by a tank shock. How exactly that worked mutated over time, but you may recall players forming specific shapes with their vehicles in their opponent's deployment zone to autokill units due to weird rules interactions.

I'd also worry about a tank-heavy list completely shutting down their opponent's primary objectives by tank shocking onto them every turn. Especially if those tanks became harder to remove.

You'd need to change a few things here and there to make it work. Without template weapons, it may not be worth having at all.

Well, not everyone had dozer blades back in the day, and they were kind of an auto-take for those who did. Assuming you gave all vehicles access to them, they'd kind of just become a points tax to ignore bog tests. Which makes me feel like bog tests shouldn't be a thing. Might be a fun include in a vehicle-focused variant of 40k though (like Spearhead).

I can see that, but as more of a simulationist, I want to see the less than ideal aspects of vehicles shown alongside their strong points.
   
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The dark hollows of Kentucky

Here's an idea: I've never heard anyone complain about Valorous Heart SoB, so why not apply their trait to heavy vehicles? So anything T8 or better would get:

Heavy Armour: If this unit is successfully wounded by any weapon with an AP characteristic of -1 or -2 treat that weapon's AP characteristic as 0 instead.


Obviously it could be worded better by someone with a better command of the English language, but I think you get the gist. This way mid-strength mid-AP weapons could still wound heavy armour but the unit being wounded would have a better chance of saving the wound, and those mid-strength mid-AP weapons would still be good against light vehicles and meq units. T7 vehicles could ignore AP-1. Probably shouldn't apply to everything T8 though, something like knights that already have invuls would probably be a bit obnoxious with this added on too.
   
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I just WISH we could get some form of Armor rules that actually make T8 mean something. I don't like seeing a T8 platform get dropped by 2 conscript squads with lucky s3 shots. I want weapons to have Anti-armor qualities, or something. NOT KEYWORDS...
But a Melta should be able to drop a tank in two shots, SHOULD BE ABLE, not always.

You should not be able to penetrate a Baneblade's hull wqith a lucky autogun shot.

If a model has "anti-Armor" capabilities, it can get +1 to wound. If it doesn't it gets -1 to wound. Anything wounding on a 7+ is basically useless then. It would prevent grot guns, lasguns, autoguns, and most "bolter" weapons from getting wound rolls inthe first place.
   
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Fixture of Dakka





My T8 wraithlord is spindly and has lots of "joints" that look like they're probably not as durable as the rest of him. I don't have an issue picturing lasguns or bolters occassionally hitting some of those points and doing some small amount of damage each time.

My land raider has exposed guns and treads that don't look any more durable than the ones on my razorback. Heck, the latter is even modeled with a gunner standing half out of the tank. I also don't have a problem imagining lasguns and bolters hurting that gunner or eventually tearing up the treads.

Weapons that have to fish for 6s to wound my vehicles are not reliably bringing down my vehicles. When such weapons do deliver the coup de grace, it's easy enough to picture my cockpits having been shattered, my hull having been compromised enough for shots to find their way inside, or my wraithlord's plating cracked to expose his spirit stone.



ATTENTION
. Psychic tests are unfluffy. Your longing for AV is understandable but misguided. Your chapter doesn't need a separate codex. Doctrines should go away. Being a "troop" means nothing. This has been a cranky service announcement. You may now resume your regularly scheduled arguing.
 
   
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Gore-Soaked Lunatic Witchhunter







Wyldhunt wrote:
...Weapons that have to fish for 6s to wound my vehicles are not reliably bringing down my vehicles. When such weapons do deliver the coup de grace, it's easy enough to picture my cockpits having been shattered, my hull having been compromised enough for shots to find their way inside, or my wraithlord's plating cracked to expose his spirit stone...


I don't think the problem is weapons that need to fish for 6s to wound vehicles so much as it's people stacking buffs on a unit until they can reliably take down a Knight with a squad of Space Marines with combat knives.

Balanced Game: Noun. A game in which all options and choices are worth using.
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Longtime Dakkanaut







Since 8th flatlined wound rolls to "strength = 2x toughness" and "toughness=2x strength" while most vehicles are toughness 6, 7 or 8, the end result is that it's fairly reliable to plan antitank around Strength 5 ("will wound vehicles on 5+") or Strength 9 ("will wound vehicles on 3+"). In either case, the target number will remain the same whether aiming for a Land Speeder or a Land Raider.

Generally speaking, 40k doesn't really have toughness 9 or 10 models. In most cases, upgrading from strength 8 to 9 only matters if your opponent has toughness 8 models. Upgrading from 9 to 10 only matters if your opponent has toughness 5 models. Strength 5 to 6 is a little more useful because it improves damage versus toughness 3, 5, and 6 but otherwise, improving strength will only improve your anti-vehicle capability versus a smaller subset of vehicles, rather than it being a straightforward "more strength=better".

By contrast, a +1 to-wound modifier is a +1 to-wound modifier, whether from a Stratagem, or other bespoke rule. To be fair, 9th is moving towards 'natural 1s' and 'natural 6s' so that "Bladestorm on a 5+" isn't as reliable a tank-killer as it can potentially be. However, with the fact that each dot of strength also increases the number of toughness values you can wound on 5+ (S3 can wound T4-5 on 5+. T4 can wound T5-7 on 5+. T5 can wound T6-9 on 5+. Etc), then the penalties to having lower strength weapons aren't as severe as beforehand.
   
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I think the problem with vehicles is that because for some reason they decided that the metric for heavy tank or light tank was.... how vulnerable it is to small arms fire????? and thus all vehicles are essentially the same by the numbers. T7/8, Sv3+, W10-12, effectively comes out to a wash the way the AT weapons out there see it.

In general, almost all armored vehicles that are armored are armored to be bulletproof. The question is what grade of AT weapon are they armored to withstand.

So IMO, tanks should have been T8, T9, T10 instead of T6, T7, T8.



I don't think infantry weapons should have been able to hurt tanks at all, but we crossed that river a while ago and there's no going back because now "everything should be able to hurt everything" is some sort of sacred concept instead of like, I don't know, the idea an army that needed an exemption to the fundamental way armies are built and operate in order to allow it to be fielded and still essentially can't play the same game that every other army does is maybe a problem in concept.

This message was edited 3 times. Last update was at 2020/09/24 21:35:51


Guardsmen, hear me! Cadia may lie in ruin, but her proud people do not! For each brother and sister who gave their lives to Him as martyrs, we will reap a vengeance fiftyfold! Cadia may be no more, but will never be forgotten; our foes shall tremble in fear at the name, for their doom shall come from the barrels of Cadian guns, fired by Cadian hands! Forward, for vengeance and retribution, in His name and the names of our fallen comrades! 
   
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 Inquisitor Lord Katherine wrote:
I think the problem with vehicles is that because for some reason they decided that the metric for heavy tank or light tank was.... how vulnerable it is to small arms fire????? and thus all vehicles are essentially the same by the numbers. T7/8, Sv3+, W10-12, effectively comes out to a wash the way the AT weapons out there see it.

In general, almost all armored vehicles that are armored are armored to be bulletproof. The question is what grade of AT weapon are they armored to withstand.

So IMO, tanks should have been T8, T9, T10 instead of T6, T7, T8.


I agree, IMO things that were mostly AV14 should be T10, AV13 to T9, etc with all proper vehicles (not bikes) being at least T6.

This means lasguns need 6s for all vehicles (going from no chance to 5s for light vehicles was ridiculous); it means the panoply of S5 weapons are now on 6s against land raiders, monoliths and the like (as they well should be); and as you note it will differentiate between resisting some of the heavier weapons and mean those extra pips of S on the heaviest weapons actually mean something against the targets they are designed to fight.
   
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 AnomanderRake wrote:
Wyldhunt wrote:
...Weapons that have to fish for 6s to wound my vehicles are not reliably bringing down my vehicles. When such weapons do deliver the coup de grace, it's easy enough to picture my cockpits having been shattered, my hull having been compromised enough for shots to find their way inside, or my wraithlord's plating cracked to expose his spirit stone...


I don't think the problem is weapons that need to fish for 6s to wound vehicles so much as it's people stacking buffs on a unit until they can reliably take down a Knight with a squad of Space Marines with combat knives.


There seems to be some disagreement about that in this thread. Some people seem to be concerned with autoguns penetrating land raider hulls while others are more concerned about strength 6/7 being more effective than meltaguns against heavier vehicles. Seems like there's a lot of variety in just how durable people want vehicles to be and against which weapons.


ATTENTION
. Psychic tests are unfluffy. Your longing for AV is understandable but misguided. Your chapter doesn't need a separate codex. Doctrines should go away. Being a "troop" means nothing. This has been a cranky service announcement. You may now resume your regularly scheduled arguing.
 
   
Made in us
Gore-Soaked Lunatic Witchhunter







Wyldhunt wrote:
 AnomanderRake wrote:
Wyldhunt wrote:
...Weapons that have to fish for 6s to wound my vehicles are not reliably bringing down my vehicles. When such weapons do deliver the coup de grace, it's easy enough to picture my cockpits having been shattered, my hull having been compromised enough for shots to find their way inside, or my wraithlord's plating cracked to expose his spirit stone...


I don't think the problem is weapons that need to fish for 6s to wound vehicles so much as it's people stacking buffs on a unit until they can reliably take down a Knight with a squad of Space Marines with combat knives.


There seems to be some disagreement about that in this thread. Some people seem to be concerned with autoguns penetrating land raider hulls while others are more concerned about strength 6/7 being more effective than meltaguns against heavier vehicles. Seems like there's a lot of variety in just how durable people want vehicles to be and against which weapons.


To my mind the primary issue here is wounds/damage rather than S/T; the fact that spammable multi-wound infantry exist means that spammable D2 weapons need to exist, which borks vehicles really badly.

The low-interference fix that wouldn't require rethinking the S/T table or putting vehicles back on a different statline would be giving vehicles some small amount of damage reduction (like the Serpent Shield but minimum D0) and buffing the damage of "real" AT weapons (the d6-damage things) a bit.

Balanced Game: Noun. A game in which all options and choices are worth using.
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Longtime Dakkanaut






I think that GW missed that if you base the metric on halves and doubles, then the higher you make strength/toughness, the higher you need to make the counter to compensate.

T1 needs S2 to wound on a 2+, which you need T4 to wound on a 6+, which you need S8 to wound on a 2+, which you need T16 to wound on a 6+...

If they just remove the half/double mechanic and go back to +2/-2 there will be a complete fix to the weapons system - S6 will wound T4 on 2's, but S3 will wound T5 on 6's. thus toughness 8 Vs S9 will be the same as T3 vs S4.

Or, they can remove the "iconic" status of lascannons = S9 and missiles = S8, and instead make decent anti-tank guns S14 (wounding T7 on a 2+) and then make AV10 all round vehicles T7, AV11 will be T8, and AV12 T9 and AV13 T10 and AV14 T11. Then volcano cannons can go to S22 and have done with it!

At that point I'd also like S=Tx3 to auto-wound. No guardsman should survive a hit from a lascannon!

12,300 points of Orks
9th W/D/L with Orks, 4/0/2
I am Thoruk, the Barbarian, Slayer of Ducks, and This is my blog!

I'm Selling Infinity, 40k, dystopian wars, UK based!

I also make designs for t-shirts and mugs and such on Redbubble! 
   
Made in us
Longtime Dakkanaut





Make 2 strategems.
One is called "Lord of War's Great Armor" and costs 4 cp. If used on a single lord of war, it makes that lord of war -1 to wound for the turn.
The other is called "the plucky tank that could" and its the same strategem for a vehicle that ISNT a lord of war, but costs only 2 cp.


Viola. you can make a leman russ immune to lasguns fired in waves and waves, forcing the grenade launchers to actually use krak against it. You can make your castellan knight immune to the obscene, massed bolterfire of the angry aggressors (18 of them) that would bring it down... Its just built, as all the op crap cheese that factions (exception marines) can use, into a strategem rather than a ruleset, so you can't do this all the time, or without cost.

This message was edited 1 time. Last update was at 2020/09/25 15:53:24


Guard gaurd gAAAARDity Gaurd gaurd.  
   
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Longtime Dakkanaut




Dukeofstuff wrote:
Make 2 strategems.
One is called "Lord of War's Great Armor" and costs 4 cp. If used on a single lord of war, it makes that lord of war -1 to wound for the turn.
The other is called "the plucky tank that could" and its the same strategem for a vehicle that ISNT a lord of war, but costs only 2 cp.


Viola. you can make a leman russ immune to lasguns fired in waves and waves, forcing the grenade launchers to actually use krak against it. You can make your castellan knight immune to the obscene, massed bolterfire of the angry aggressors (18 of them) that would bring it down... Its just built, as all the op crap cheese that factions (exception marines) can use, into a strategem rather than a ruleset, so you can't do this all the time, or without cost.


While it helps that a lot of CP especially when you have +1to wound strategums & abilities that are way cheaper.
That before you get onto the MW on 6's abilities always wounds on a 4+ strategums.
   
 
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