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I only say this for eradicators because a gravis model with a melta weapon would have probably come in at about 40 pts in early 8th by their design paradigm.

There is nothing iterative about marines 8.5. They added so much stuff all at once, they couldn't possibly have known the effects They didn't care. Likely primaris weren't selling (because they were garbage) as they wished, so turn it up to 11.

Tycho wrote:

You're right, the problem is GW. Not the AV system. So let's bring back something that's a not unreasonable concession to verisimilitude and remove the vehicles-as-wounds-pinatas mechanic, since it doesn't actually solve any problems.

Have to agree that, at least for me, the issue wasn't with AV itself, but rather with some of the rules surrounding AV. I think that if you fixed the damage table so that you weren't stun-locking vehicles for entire games (because that was the most fun-killing mechanic ever), and brought back vehicle firing arcs, you could make a real case for using AV. Would go a long way towards fixing some of the issues we currently have with some heavy weapons being replaced by mass-plasma guns, etc. and bring back the need for legitimate anti-tank. It could force some interesting decision making in list building imo.

Plasma Guns were still better overall than Lascannons simply because when you could get them enmasse it would be on a Deep Strike unit. I legit stopped running Combi-Melta on my CSM Termicide units and switched to Combi-Plasma because of the extra range giving flexibility and mass shots doing enough.

Of course Loyalists didn't have that issue because Grav but there ya go. In fact, the only army that really had issues with AV would be Imperial Guard by themselves, along with Grey Knights if only looking towards range combat. Deathwatch being called an army is a bit farfetched. For evil dudes, yeah CSM really only had that saving grace of cheap suicide Plasma/Melta and cheap Autocannons to glance to death.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

SecondTime wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

SecondTime wrote:
Okay it improves detail. Is that worthwhile though?

Detail is not a synonym for verisimilitude but I appreciate how hard you're struggling to avoid having to admit you just don't care if the game is true to its background or not (except when it applies to YOUR army, after all, it's completely unbelievable that the BA would ever tripoint! Death company are too insane for such shenangians!)

Oh yes such the struggle. Sorry I misconstrued your fancy word.

Apology accepted; I still haven't seen any real rebuttal as to why we shouldn't bring AV back though.

I'm assuming that you're advocating for bringing back the whole AV 'system' rather than just the idea that it should be called armor value and you should roll a die add your strength and try to get higher than a fixed value.

If so, here's why I would say that, despite the possibility of increased versimilitude, I'm not a huge fan of av as it was implemented in previous editions.

1) I like the way Light Vehicles interact with current SvsT than I do the way they interacted with AV. A T5 vehicle in current system is naturally less efficient to shoot at with a S8 or S9 weapon than a standard vehicle, because you lose points efficiency by exceeding but not doubling the toughness value of the vehicle. This introduces a 'middle category' of light vehicles and tough infantry that are both most efficent to shoot at with mid-strength weaponry that was useless with the "AV no HP" system of 5th and overpowered with "AV with HP" systems.

2) I disliked the way that all vehicles sharing a universal damage table meant that heavy vehicles seemed much much much much too easy to knock out with a single shot.

3) a game that tries to support a range of models as large as titans to as small as gretchins actually does benefit pretty significantly from a system that allows everything, however inefficiently, to interact with everything else.

I have implemented light, simple systems to reintroduce elements of previous editions I miss (I created a very simple add-on system for 8th that reintroduced turning, rear arc damage, and tank shock to the game for a Mad Max scenario) and heavy overhauls bringing things back to even before 5th ed style to 2nd ed style bespoke vehicle damage tables, and mostly I've found that the theoretical fun of all that wild randomness rarely lives up to what you want it to be on the tabletop.

I don't know what he means, but a different table for heavier vehicles would have been nice.

the_scotsman wrote:
I'm assuming that you're advocating for bringing back the whole AV 'system' rather than just the idea that it should be called armor value and you should roll a die add your strength and try to get higher than a fixed value.

If so, here's why I would say that, despite the possibility of increased versimilitude, I'm not a huge fan of av as it was implemented in previous editions.

1) I like the way Light Vehicles interact with current SvsT than I do the way they interacted with AV. A T5 vehicle in current system is naturally less efficient to shoot at with a S8 or S9 weapon than a standard vehicle, because you lose points efficiency by exceeding but not doubling the toughness value of the vehicle. This introduces a 'middle category' of light vehicles and tough infantry that are both most efficent to shoot at with mid-strength weaponry that was useless with the "AV no HP" system of 5th and overpowered with "AV with HP" systems.

2) I disliked the way that all vehicles sharing a universal damage table meant that heavy vehicles seemed much much much much too easy to knock out with a single shot.

3) a game that tries to support a range of models as large as titans to as small as gretchins actually does benefit pretty significantly from a system that allows everything, however inefficiently, to interact with everything else.

I have implemented light, simple systems to reintroduce elements of previous editions I miss (I created a very simple add-on system for 8th that reintroduced turning, rear arc damage, and tank shock to the game for a Mad Max scenario) and heavy overhauls bringing things back to even before 5th ed style to 2nd ed style bespoke vehicle damage tables, and mostly I've found that the theoretical fun of all that wild randomness rarely lives up to what you want it to be on the tabletop.

Good post, and I'll outline my thoughts here. For starters, I generally mean a modified version of what GW already had; what GW did have was flawed in many of the ways I outlined in my "history of" post. With that out of the way, I'll get to your points:
1) Why is such a "middle category" of vehicles necessary? I also would argue they are not useless. Things like hellounds and chimerae and Land Speeders had roles in 4th and 5th. I'm not sure what vehicle you're talking about, but I generally need more detail on what you mean and why this is a good thing. I don't see any real reason a Lascannon should be less efficient against a Rhino than against a Land Raider (except that it's killing a cheaper target of course).

2) This is why I advocated for 4th edition rather than 5th - the unified damage table of 5th is also a problem I have. I'd do a 4th-style damage resolution table at worst, and probably could see vehicle damage tables even being a datasheet thing (though no doubt that's too complicated!)

3) Why? There are systems that support fewer things at a consistent scale but still have units with no ability to interact with each other (e.g. American Rifle Platoon with MMGs and HMGs vs a Tiger tank platoon in Flames of War). Why is "everything can interact with everything" a good thing, and furthermore why must interact be translated into "can hurt"?

Karol wrote:
I don't if GW fully got it though, because in 8th being clobbered by -2/-3 to hit flyers that were post cost efficient and had rules synergy, when some armies had no tools to deal with such stuff didn't sound a lot better, then losing the game because a single tank got blow up.

Flyers (as opposed to skimmers) should never have been added to the 40k ruleset.

Hecaton wrote:

Karol wrote:
I don't if GW fully got it though, because in 8th being clobbered by -2/-3 to hit flyers that were post cost efficient and had rules synergy, when some armies had no tools to deal with such stuff didn't sound a lot better, then losing the game because a single tank got blow up.

Flyers (as opposed to skimmers) should never have been added to the 40k ruleset.

You can blame the stormraven.

Flyers should've gottn common sense rules, f.e. only after x ammount of pts is reached, but the same applies to a lot of LoW.

Meanwhile GW decides it's also a good idea to make boards smaller.

SecondTime wrote:

Hecaton wrote:

Karol wrote:
I don't if GW fully got it though, because in 8th being clobbered by -2/-3 to hit flyers that were post cost efficient and had rules synergy, when some armies had no tools to deal with such stuff didn't sound a lot better, then losing the game because a single tank got blow up.

Flyers (as opposed to skimmers) should never have been added to the 40k ruleset.

You can blame the stormraven.

I mean, if we're talking about all the aircraft that snuck into the 5e rules as Fast Skimmers you could blame the Stormraven, Valkyrie, Razorwing, and Night Scythe/Doom Scythe (probably forgetting a few there).

 AnomanderRake wrote:

SecondTime wrote:

Hecaton wrote:

Karol wrote:
I don't if GW fully got it though, because in 8th being clobbered by -2/-3 to hit flyers that were post cost efficient and had rules synergy, when some armies had no tools to deal with such stuff didn't sound a lot better, then losing the game because a single tank got blow up.

Flyers (as opposed to skimmers) should never have been added to the 40k ruleset.

You can blame the stormraven.

I mean, if we're talking about all the aircraft that snuck into the 5e rules as Fast Skimmers you could blame the Stormraven, Valkyrie, Razorwing, and Night Scythe/Doom Scythe (probably forgetting a few there).

That's true, I guess.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

the_scotsman wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

SecondTime wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

SecondTime wrote:
Okay it improves detail. Is that worthwhile though?

Detail is not a synonym for verisimilitude but I appreciate how hard you're struggling to avoid having to admit you just don't care if the game is true to its background or not (except when it applies to YOUR army, after all, it's completely unbelievable that the BA would ever tripoint! Death company are too insane for such shenangians!)

Oh yes such the struggle. Sorry I misconstrued your fancy word.

Apology accepted; I still haven't seen any real rebuttal as to why we shouldn't bring AV back though.

I'm assuming that you're advocating for bringing back the whole AV 'system' rather than just the idea that it should be called armor value and you should roll a die add your strength and try to get higher than a fixed value.

If so, here's why I would say that, despite the possibility of increased versimilitude, I'm not a huge fan of av as it was implemented in previous editions.

1) I like the way Light Vehicles interact with current SvsT than I do the way they interacted with AV. A T5 vehicle in current system is naturally less efficient to shoot at with a S8 or S9 weapon than a standard vehicle, because you lose points efficiency by exceeding but not doubling the toughness value of the vehicle. This introduces a 'middle category' of light vehicles and tough infantry that are both most efficent to shoot at with mid-strength weaponry that was useless with the "AV no HP" system of 5th and overpowered with "AV with HP" systems.

2) I disliked the way that all vehicles sharing a universal damage table meant that heavy vehicles seemed much much much much too easy to knock out with a single shot.

3) a game that tries to support a range of models as large as titans to as small as gretchins actually does benefit pretty significantly from a system that allows everything, however inefficiently, to interact with everything else.

I have implemented light, simple systems to reintroduce elements of previous editions I miss (I created a very simple add-on system for 8th that reintroduced turning, rear arc damage, and tank shock to the game for a Mad Max scenario) and heavy overhauls bringing things back to even before 5th ed style to 2nd ed style bespoke vehicle damage tables, and mostly I've found that the theoretical fun of all that wild randomness rarely lives up to what you want it to be on the tabletop.

I more or less agree with this take. I admittedly didn't put this much effort into the topic.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

the_scotsman wrote:
I'm assuming that you're advocating for bringing back the whole AV 'system' rather than just the idea that it should be called armor value and you should roll a die add your strength and try to get higher than a fixed value.

If so, here's why I would say that, despite the possibility of increased versimilitude, I'm not a huge fan of av as it was implemented in previous editions.

1) I like the way Light Vehicles interact with current SvsT than I do the way they interacted with AV. A T5 vehicle in current system is naturally less efficient to shoot at with a S8 or S9 weapon than a standard vehicle, because you lose points efficiency by exceeding but not doubling the toughness value of the vehicle. This introduces a 'middle category' of light vehicles and tough infantry that are both most efficent to shoot at with mid-strength weaponry that was useless with the "AV no HP" system of 5th and overpowered with "AV with HP" systems.

2) I disliked the way that all vehicles sharing a universal damage table meant that heavy vehicles seemed much much much much too easy to knock out with a single shot.

3) a game that tries to support a range of models as large as titans to as small as gretchins actually does benefit pretty significantly from a system that allows everything, however inefficiently, to interact with everything else.

I have implemented light, simple systems to reintroduce elements of previous editions I miss (I created a very simple add-on system for 8th that reintroduced turning, rear arc damage, and tank shock to the game for a Mad Max scenario) and heavy overhauls bringing things back to even before 5th ed style to 2nd ed style bespoke vehicle damage tables, and mostly I've found that the theoretical fun of all that wild randomness rarely lives up to what you want it to be on the tabletop.

Good post, and I'll outline my thoughts here. For starters, I generally mean a modified version of what GW already had; what GW did have was flawed in many of the ways I outlined in my "history of" post. With that out of the way, I'll get to your points:
1) Why is such a "middle category" of vehicles necessary? I also would argue they are not useless. Things like hellounds and chimerae and Land Speeders had roles in 4th and 5th. I'm not sure what vehicle you're talking about, but I generally need more detail on what you mean and why this is a good thing. I don't see any real reason a Lascannon should be less efficient against a Rhino than against a Land Raider (except that it's killing a cheaper target of course).

2) This is why I advocated for 4th edition rather than 5th - the unified damage table of 5th is also a problem I have. I'd do a 4th-style damage resolution table at worst, and probably could see vehicle damage tables even being a datasheet thing (though no doubt that's too complicated!)

3) Why? There are systems that support fewer things at a consistent scale but still have units with no ability to interact with each other (e.g. American Rifle Platoon with MMGs and HMGs vs a Tiger tank platoon in Flames of War). Why is "everything can interact with everything" a good thing, and furthermore why must interact be translated into "can hurt"?

1) because frankly 40k is not a particularly deep game, and it is kept artificially shallow by a system where all infantry is W1, all weapons deal 1 damage, and lighter vehicles simply being less durable against all antitank weaponry than heavier vehicles. In my eyes, an ideal system would account for durability based on armor, durability based on speed/maneuverability, durability based on magic/energy fields and durability based on mass/momentum. The AV system essentially only allows for armor and magic/energy fields if you tack invulnerable saves on top of the penetration roll. Because 40k is shallow enough that to-hit modifiers are problematic (reducing the effectiveness of some factions' shooting too much such that GW capped it at +1/-1) I find the current shorthand of having light vehicles occupy that zone of T5-T6 where S8 and S9 lose mathematical efficiency vs S6-S7 is an elegant inbuilt system that does not require layering an additional special rule on top to represent "speed based durability."

If you had me design an 'ideal' system...sure, it would probably involve something that would bear some resemblance to the old av system in one of its steps. But if I'm comparing the AV system AS IT WAS IMPLEMENTED to the S v T system AS IT IS IMPLEMENTED I prefer the latter. I am frankly not all that interested in comparing the current S vs T system to some theoretical, perfect, versimilliriffic modified AV system that exists in your mind.

2) i'll admit to having very little experience actually playing 4th (I think I played like 4 games before 5th dropped) but my quick reference sheet does seem to have unified VDTs. It just has a different table for glancing and penetrating hits instead of a single table and a -2 to the table if you scored a glance. Personally I don't see how having VDTs be part of the vehicle datasheet is any more complex than, say, figuring out how many special rules your average marine unit has to keep track of in 9th ed, but I guess that's just me.

3) because as much as I know you historically have railed against this fact, a game in which one player cannot hurt the other player's models and remove them from the board and the other player can just is not fun for the player whose stuff is getting killed, even if they are declared 'the winner' at the end of every single game without fail. Maybe it's a common thing in Flames of War for people to be perfectly A-OK playing against armies entirely made up of tiger tanks they can't hurt, but in the years since they came out I have yet to meet a dedicated only-knights player out of the scores of 40k players I've seen come through where I play, and I have yet to hear about one in any context other than people complaining about them. Maybe they exist somewhere out there in the ether, but I personally have never seen it.

Having a hit table for each vehicle in 2nd was fine. What was NOT fine was how frequently every passenger in a transport was instantly killed, thereby making those transports useless.

the_scotsman wrote:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

the_scotsman wrote:
I'm assuming that you're advocating for bringing back the whole AV 'system' rather than just the idea that it should be called armor value and you should roll a die add your strength and try to get higher than a fixed value.

If so, here's why I would say that, despite the possibility of increased versimilitude, I'm not a huge fan of av as it was implemented in previous editions.

1) I like the way Light Vehicles interact with current SvsT than I do the way they interacted with AV. A T5 vehicle in current system is naturally less efficient to shoot at with a S8 or S9 weapon than a standard vehicle, because you lose points efficiency by exceeding but not doubling the toughness value of the vehicle. This introduces a 'middle category' of light vehicles and tough infantry that are both most efficent to shoot at with mid-strength weaponry that was useless with the "AV no HP" system of 5th and overpowered with "AV with HP" systems.

2) I disliked the way that all vehicles sharing a universal damage table meant that heavy vehicles seemed much much much much too easy to knock out with a single shot.

3) a game that tries to support a range of models as large as titans to as small as gretchins actually does benefit pretty significantly from a system that allows everything, however inefficiently, to interact with everything else.

I have implemented light, simple systems to reintroduce elements of previous editions I miss (I created a very simple add-on system for 8th that reintroduced turning, rear arc damage, and tank shock to the game for a Mad Max scenario) and heavy overhauls bringing things back to even before 5th ed style to 2nd ed style bespoke vehicle damage tables, and mostly I've found that the theoretical fun of all that wild randomness rarely lives up to what you want it to be on the tabletop.

Good post, and I'll outline my thoughts here. For starters, I generally mean a modified version of what GW already had; what GW did have was flawed in many of the ways I outlined in my "history of" post. With that out of the way, I'll get to your points:
1) Why is such a "middle category" of vehicles necessary? I also would argue they are not useless. Things like hellounds and chimerae and Land Speeders had roles in 4th and 5th. I'm not sure what vehicle you're talking about, but I generally need more detail on what you mean and why this is a good thing. I don't see any real reason a Lascannon should be less efficient against a Rhino than against a Land Raider (except that it's killing a cheaper target of course).

2) This is why I advocated for 4th edition rather than 5th - the unified damage table of 5th is also a problem I have. I'd do a 4th-style damage resolution table at worst, and probably could see vehicle damage tables even being a datasheet thing (though no doubt that's too complicated!)

3) Why? There are systems that support fewer things at a consistent scale but still have units with no ability to interact with each other (e.g. American Rifle Platoon with MMGs and HMGs vs a Tiger tank platoon in Flames of War). Why is "everything can interact with everything" a good thing, and furthermore why must interact be translated into "can hurt"?

1) because frankly 40k is not a particularly deep game, and it is kept artificially shallow by a system where all infantry is W1, all weapons deal 1 damage, and lighter vehicles simply being less durable against all antitank weaponry than heavier vehicles. In my eyes, an ideal system would account for durability based on armor, durability based on speed/maneuverability, durability based on magic/energy fields and durability based on mass/momentum. The AV system essentially only allows for armor and magic/energy fields if you tack invulnerable saves on top of the penetration roll. Because 40k is shallow enough that to-hit modifiers are problematic (reducing the effectiveness of some factions' shooting too much such that GW capped it at +1/-1) I find the current shorthand of having light vehicles occupy that zone of T5-T6 where S8 and S9 lose mathematical efficiency vs S6-S7 is an elegant inbuilt system that does not require layering an additional special rule on top to represent "speed based durability."

If you had me design an 'ideal' system...sure, it would probably involve something that would bear some resemblance to the old av system in one of its steps. But if I'm comparing the AV system AS IT WAS IMPLEMENTED to the S v T system AS IT IS IMPLEMENTED I prefer the latter. I am frankly not all that interested in comparing the current S vs T system to some theoretical, perfect, versimilliriffic modified AV system that exists in your mind.

2) i'll admit to having very little experience actually playing 4th (I think I played like 4 games before 5th dropped) but my quick reference sheet does seem to have unified VDTs. It just has a different table for glancing and penetrating hits instead of a single table and a -2 to the table if you scored a glance. Personally I don't see how having VDTs be part of the vehicle datasheet is any more complex than, say, figuring out how many special rules your average marine unit has to keep track of in 9th ed, but I guess that's just me.

3) because as much as I know you historically have railed against this fact, a game in which one player cannot hurt the other player's models and remove them from the board and the other player can just is not fun for the player whose stuff is getting killed, even if they are declared 'the winner' at the end of every single game without fail. Maybe it's a common thing in Flames of War for people to be perfectly A-OK playing against armies entirely made up of tiger tanks they can't hurt, but in the years since they came out I have yet to meet a dedicated only-knights player out of the scores of 40k players I've seen come through where I play, and I have yet to hear about one in any context other than people complaining about them. Maybe they exist somewhere out there in the ether, but I personally have never seen it.

Look at all the things I guess I should have said.

the_scotsman wrote:
1) because frankly 40k is not a particularly deep game, and it is kept artificially shallow by a system where all infantry is W1, all weapons deal 1 damage, and lighter vehicles simply being less durable against all antitank weaponry than heavier vehicles. In my eyes, an ideal system would account for durability based on armor, durability based on speed/maneuverability, durability based on magic/energy fields and durability based on mass/momentum. The AV system essentially only allows for armor and magic/energy fields if you tack invulnerable saves on top of the penetration roll. Because 40k is shallow enough that to-hit modifiers are problematic (reducing the effectiveness of some factions' shooting too much such that GW capped it at +1/-1) I find the current shorthand of having light vehicles occupy that zone of T5-T6 where S8 and S9 lose mathematical efficiency vs S6-S7 is an elegant inbuilt system that does not require layering an additional special rule on top to represent "speed based durability."

"Speed-based durability" is meaningless, because it's so fuzzy. If you mean speed as in "being slightly faster" then there's no durability advantage - e.g. if you doubled the speed of a Sherman tank, it doesn't become more durable. It becomes operationally more useful, but it isn't going to throw off the enemy's aim or anything. Remember, a Land Speeder is only twice as fast as a Leman Russ.

If you mean Evasion, then that should be it's own stat, and should apply to every model in the game (and essentially turn To-Hit into a contested roll like To-Wound is).

the_scotsman wrote:
If you had me design an 'ideal' system...sure, it would probably involve something that would bear some resemblance to the old av system in one of its steps. But if I'm comparing the AV system AS IT WAS IMPLEMENTED to the S v T system AS IT IS IMPLEMENTED I prefer the latter. I am frankly not all that interested in comparing the current S vs T system to some theoretical, perfect, versimilliriffic modified AV system that exists in your mind.

It's a bit unfair to ask me to defend a system I know for a fact is flawed and needs improvement, don't you think? Especially when we are agitating for future change in the rules and the change is more detailed than "go back to fourth" even if I sometimes sum it up that way for brevity.

the_scotsman wrote:
2) i'll admit to having very little experience actually playing 4th (I think I played like 4 games before 5th dropped) but my quick reference sheet does seem to have unified VDTs. It just has a different table for glancing and penetrating hits instead of a single table and a -2 to the table if you scored a glance. Personally I don't see how having VDTs be part of the vehicle datasheet is any more complex than, say, figuring out how many special rules your average marine unit has to keep track of in 9th ed, but I guess that's just me.

That's an incomplete QRS if it misses the Ordnance Penetrating Hits table. I agree; I'd rather have datasheet-based VDTs. But people would no doubt complain at me.

the_scotsman wrote:
3) because as much as I know you historically have railed against this fact, a game in which one player cannot hurt the other player's models and remove them from the board and the other player can just is not fun for the player whose stuff is getting killed, even if they are declared 'the winner' at the end of every single game without fail. Maybe it's a common thing in Flames of War for people to be perfectly A-OK playing against armies entirely made up of tiger tanks they can't hurt, but in the years since they came out I have yet to meet a dedicated only-knights player out of the scores of 40k players I've seen come through where I play, and I have yet to hear about one in any context other than people complaining about them. Maybe they exist somewhere out there in the ether, but I personally have never seen it.

In a world war two game (as in the example I used) the problem would be on the player who doesn't bring any anti-tank weapons to kill the Tigers, not on the player who brought Tiger tanks. The Ork player (in your example of Grots vs Warlord Titan) should not be able to use Grots to kill the Titan; instead he should bring something for killing Titans. Making "everything hurt everything" just makes the greatest capability weapon in every category the best weapon - instead of dedicated weapon roles, you end up with Imperial Fists armies using Onlsaught Gatling Cannons to equal effectiveness against Knight armies as against Tyranid hordes. GW actually had to patch this out of the game with a spot-weld it got so bad. But fixing the symptom didn't fix the core rule issue, which is the idea that a Nurgling should be able to meaningfully impede a Titan.

Plus, even your vaunted tenet of "everything should hurt everything" doesn't come through. How does a Daemonette squad hurt a Thunderbolt fighter? Oh, they can't. Yet it's okay, in modern 40k, just only for aircraft and not for tanks

I still think "everything hurting everything" is a trap for the uninitiated. It just makes target selection harder for players who can't do math on the fly quickly. Sure, my lasguns can wound T6 on a 6, but I'm probably hurting my overall chances by rolling dice that are likely meaningless and burning up my chess clock time.

The annoyance is that AT gun don't act like AT guns. But invulnerable saves already ruined that for me, so taking away AV seems a lot less impactful.

Furthermore, we still had scatterlasers glancing down IKs on the side in 7th without a single penetrating hit. So while everything couldn't hurt everything, we certainly had unintended consequences because of the limited number of AVs in the game, the limited number of S profiles, and the variance on a D6.

The phenomenon of sandpapering vehicles is hardly new in 40K.

SecondTime wrote:
I still think "everything hurting everything" is a trap for the uninitiated. It just makes target selection harder for players who can't do math on the fly quickly. Sure, my lasguns can wound T6 on a 6, but I'm probably hurting my overall chances by rolling dice that are likely meaningless and burning up my chess clock time.

The annoyance is that AT gun don't act like AT guns. But invulnerable saves already ruined that for me, so taking away AV seems a lot less impactful.

Furthermore, we still had scatterlasers glancing down IKs on the side in 7th without a single penetrating hit. So while everything couldn't hurt everything, we certainly had unintended consequences because of the limited number of AVs in the game, the limited number of S profiles, and the variance on a D6.

The phenomenon of sandpapering vehicles is hardly new in 40K.

Right, but you wouldn't see scatterlasers glancing down IKs in 4th. Because hullpoints didn't exist. Scatterlasers simply couldn't kill them. You could cripple them, tearing off weapons and stuff, but IIRC you couldn't inflict actual structure point damage to superheavies with glancing hits until Hull Points came around and replaced Structure Points. (OTOH a penetrating hit could chain-react and still one-shot the vehicle, which was always super memorable when it happened!).

EDIT:
I lied, you totally could! You'd have to roll a 6 to glance, and then another 6, so any given shot has about a 1.8% chance of doing a structure point of damage.

That's true, but I suspect the 10 fold stunned Chimera spelled the death knell of the 4th/5th vehicle system. People were REALLY sick of it by the end of 5th. I can testify to that; at least the people I knew. It's going to be hard to get away from RoF as an AT method as long as invulns are around. Dreads and wave serpents are a start, but they are just super outnumbered by invulns atm. And that's a problem independent of AV. I guess I see invulns as a bigger mathematical problem than AV vs Toughness.

Regardless, having dozens of shots that removed hull points on 6 were far more effective.

SecondTime wrote:
That's true, but I suspect the 10 fold stunned Chimera spelled the death knell of the 4th/5th vehicle system. People were REALLY sick of it by the end of 5th. I can testify to that; at least the people I knew. It's going to be hard to get away from RoF as an AT method as long as invulns are around. Dreads and wave serpents are a start, but they are just super outnumbered by invulns atm. And that's a problem independent of AV.

Hence why I suggested several solutions to that problem upthread - do away with Hull Points, but don't allow permastunning either. An example is the suggestion to make the crew take a leadership test every time the hull is damaged (pen or glance). They suffer some debuff to the test based on the number of previous penetrating or glancing hits, to represent them losing faith in the armor of their vehicle as it continues to fail to protect them. Perhaps -2 per pen, and -1 per glance? Or even -1 for every pen and -1 for every 2 glances? Who knows, I'm thinking on the fly. This would permit the realistic situation where the crew abandons their vehicle even when it hasn't lost critical systems, and could go a long way to balancing the Leman Russ and the Predator, just as examples. The Russ would be more likely to bail out, due to the Guardsmen's terrible leadership, while the Predator crew is less likely to regard superficial damage as seriously. However, the predator's thinner armor on the main would cause it to take more damage than the Russ overall, and would make it more likely for a catastrophic systems failure to destroy the tank rather than the nerve of the crew failing and resulting in an abandoned but largely functional vehicle.

It'd serve as a mechanism to capture troop quality as well as technological or hardware quality.

And Invulns are a separate problem; the way they work in general doesn't make a whole lot of sense. If I was to change Invulns it would be for both infantry and tanks and all the other things too.

Invulns need types at a minimum. Big huge forcefields on IKs should be extra wounds, not "your mega blast does absolutely nothing because D6 says so". All that means is I'm not ever bringing that kind of weapon because D6 can say it does nothing even though I hit and wounded. I should be able to reliably burn through that kind of force field and not have to pray to the dice gods. See: Protoss plasma shields.

Smaller models should have dodges, which are rolled, but also ignored by huge blasts.

Come to think of it, Starcraft uses a model where anything can hurt anything (assuming it can target it) and there is still plenty of counter play necessary. Good luck downing several battlecruisers with just marines.

1) yeah, in my ideal system the hit roll would be if not opposed like SvsT then at the very least MUCH more modifiable than it is right now where an intercessor 30" away from you shoots you exactly the same as an intercessor 2" away from you. The range values in 40k have always made the board size fairly meaningless, that's just a consequence of the size of the models gw wants us to put on the table vs the size of the board they want us to play on. At this point you can barely jam a 2000 point ork or nid army into the deployment zone of a standard size board. If max range isn't going to mean something, then I would prefer for long range and opposing evasiveness to mean something.

40k's movement characteristic vs its fluff is, admittedly, just totally asinine. You have vehicles supposedly capable of near supersonic flight like drukhari raiders moving like 2" faster than lumbering leman russ tanks. But hey, the board is only 6' x 4' or 5' x 44" if you've got a railroad spike through your brain so, making fast things actually as fast as they should be would make them just fly off the board every turn. WW2 is a bizarre example to bring up about the lack of realism behind 'evasion based durability' because of just how many instances you can point to in battles where the maneuverability of tanks and other vehicles allowing them to avoid enemy fire ends up making a huge difference.

2) I wasn't skipping the Ordnance hit table I was just ignoring it because it's effectively exactly the same as the Penetrating hit table except that the 5 result changes from 'destroyed' to 'explodes' and the 6 result changes from 'explodes' to 'annihilated.' Seems...pretty meaningless honestly, like a lot of these oldhammer GW rules that seem really cool and impactful or whatever but in practice were just fiddly nonsense. Also, worth noting here: There is for sure a 'vehicle destroyed' result on a roll of 6 on the glancing hit table. Glancing hits could absolutely destroy vehicles in 4th.

3) You know how general strategy of skew lists with longrange firepower operates when faced with a TAC list that brings the amount of antitank firepower required to meaningfully challenge a list with reasonable amounts of light infantry, so I'm not really interested in engaging with this particular fig leaf.

"general strategy of skew lists"

Yeah, its not like if you spam tanks I can tech into Banshees if I scout it properly. In 40K, I just bend over and take it.

SecondTime wrote:
Invulns need types at a minimum. Big huge forcefields on IKs should be extra wounds, not "your mega blast does absolutely nothing because D6 says so". All that means is I'm not ever bringing that kind of weapon because D6 can say it does nothing even though I hit and wounded. I should be able to reliably burn through that kind of force field and not have to pray to the dice gods. See: Protoss plasma shields.

Smaller models should have dodges, which are rolled, but also ignored by huge blasts.

Come to think of it, Starcraft uses a model where anything can hurt anything (assuming it can target it) and there is still plenty of counter play necessary. Good luck downing several battlecruisers with just marines.

I also don't like starcraft because of that lack of verisimilitude, so there you go. Also I'm fairly certain that if you spent equal resources on Marines as you did Battlecruisers, the Marines would win, and the only thing preventing that from happening is that battlecruisers use supply more efficiently (so you will never get an equal number of Marines to Battlecruisers in terms of resources spent, because both armies will hit the supply cap but the battlecruisers will have more combat power) - but enough of that digression.

I would have to think through the potential interactions of invulnerable saves with the game. In general, I am inclined to have force fields work more like Void Shields used to back in the day, where they're an additional layer of armor over the *whatever* that has to be brought down / penetrated before the actual hull/person can be hurt. It would be interesting to end up with personnel with armor values - e.g. a guy with a force field generator has an AV9 or something force-field that must be brought down before any shots can hit him properly.

I have not read this entire thread but I will put my answer to the question here.

GW has created a world that inspires imagination and a long lasting connection with it's fans. They produce models that people enjoy every facet of as well as books, video games, and even a few films. Even if they aren't the best at writing rules they have managed to create a world that people care enough about to stick around in and debate the merits of. I think that is something they have done right.

Ah, I think Starcraft is a much better game than 40K. Very different, but scouting alone makes it far more rewarding. I am helpless before you skew list without foreknowledge not available in 40K. If you had to build your Russes in real time, and hold me off with guardsmen first, I'd feel much better about it.

For verismilitude, I prefer things like World in Flames, but most Germanophiles don't enjoy historically accurate strategic wargames. Because they usually don't win.

the_scotsman wrote:
1) yeah, in my ideal system the hit roll would be if not opposed like SvsT then at the very least MUCH more modifiable than it is right now where an intercessor 30" away from you shoots you exactly the same as an intercessor 2" away from you. The range values in 40k have always made the board size fairly meaningless, that's just a consequence of the size of the models gw wants us to put on the table vs the size of the board they want us to play on. At this point you can barely jam a 2000 point ork or nid army into the deployment zone of a standard size board. If max range isn't going to mean something, then I would prefer for long range and opposing evasiveness to mean something.

40k's movement characteristic vs its fluff is, admittedly, just totally asinine. You have vehicles supposedly capable of near supersonic flight like drukhari raiders moving like 2" faster than lumbering leman russ tanks. But hey, the board is only 6' x 4' or 5' x 44" if you've got a railroad spike through your brain so, making fast things actually as fast as they should be would make them just fly off the board every turn. WW2 is a bizarre example to bring up about the lack of realism behind 'evasion based durability' because of just how many instances you can point to in battles where the maneuverability of tanks and other vehicles allowing them to avoid enemy fire ends up making a huge difference.

2) I wasn't skipping the Ordnance hit table I was just ignoring it because it's effectively exactly the same as the Penetrating hit table except that the 5 result changes from 'destroyed' to 'explodes' and the 6 result changes from 'explodes' to 'annihilated.' Seems...pretty meaningless honestly, like a lot of these oldhammer GW rules that seem really cool and impactful or whatever but in practice were just fiddly nonsense. Also, worth noting here: There is for sure a 'vehicle destroyed' result on a roll of 6 on the glancing hit table. Glancing hits could absolutely destroy vehicles in 4th.

3) You know how general strategy of skew lists with longrange firepower operates when faced with a TAC list that brings the amount of antitank firepower required to meaningfully challenge a list with reasonable amounts of light infantry, so I'm not really interested in engaging with this particular fig leaf.

1) Yes, the board size is too small. That we're totally in agreement about. As far as the movement characteristic of fluff, that's exactly the kind of thing I'm talking about with verisimilitude. If the game strove for greater verisimilitude, you'd have move characteristics that actually make sense (like how flyers worked from Forge World before Citadel got ahold of them). World War II is a great example, because that mobility didn't result in them literally dodging shells or anything like that - if a lighter vehicle like an M8 greyhound got to the point where a shot was rolling to penetrate its armor (or SvT in the modern system) then its mobility has already failed to protect it. Mobility protects you by allowing you better use of terrain and improved ability to engage the enemy from multiple directions and upset their fire plan. SvT is not the appropriate place to put that sort of durability advantage, nor would AV system. If that durability is already working to protect a vehicle, then neither AV nor Toughness will be rolled against.

2) Yes, I agree with everything you said, and is why I said I wouldn't simply port over the 4th edition system. I was simply pointing to it as an example of a multiple-vehicle-damage-table system that I was totally fine with and I don't disagree with the idea of multiple tables. And yes, glancing hits could destroy vehicles, I'm not sure where you see I said they couldn't?

3) Well, if you don't want to engage, that's fine, but there are army design rules that can be used to reduce skew and rein in army construction so that you don't end up with an anti-xenos infiltration team in a pitched battle with a superheavy tank company, but that's a different discussion. We can table this for now if you would like to have that discussion elsewhere.

"army design rules that can be used to reduce skew and rein in army construction "

None that GW is ever going to agree to use.

SecondTime wrote:
Ah, I think Starcraft is a much better game than 40K. Very different, but scouting alone makes it far more rewarding. I am helpless before you skew list without foreknowledge not available in 40K. If you had to build your Russes in real time, and hold me off with guardsmen first, I'd feel much better about it.

I agree it is a better game as a game, and I actually watch competitive games because I find it fascinating. But it isn't a good example of a "realistic" game, nor is the game play super true to the setting (insofar as the setting doesn't bend over backwards to meet the RTS half-way).

SecondTime wrote:
For verismilitude, I prefer things like World in Flames, but most Germanophiles don't enjoy historically accurate strategic wargames. Because they usually don't win.

I have heard those people called Wehraboos and I think that's hilarious.

SecondTime wrote:
Invulns need types at a minimum. Big huge forcefields on IKs should be extra wounds, not "your mega blast does absolutely nothing because D6 says so". All that means is I'm not ever bringing that kind of weapon because D6 can say it does nothing even though I hit and wounded. I should be able to reliably burn through that kind of force field and not have to pray to the dice gods. See: Protoss plasma shields.

Smaller models should have dodges, which are rolled, but also ignored by huge blasts.

Come to think of it, Starcraft uses a model where anything can hurt anything (assuming it can target it) and there is still plenty of counter play necessary. Good luck downing several battlecruisers with just marines.

well in starcraft, units have bonus damage against their intended targets. Stalkers get bonus damage against armored targets and hellions do bonus damage against light for example.
This would be a fix for 40k's weapons and we've already started seeing it implemented more and more (leviathan drills now do max damage against vehicles for example).
Basically, 40k could become well balanced if GW knew how to use their keywords.

SecondTime wrote:
"army design rules that can be used to reduce skew and rein in army construction "

None that GW is ever going to agree to use.

Well, with that attitude, you'll never get anything changed. It's okay to want for (and ask for) a better lot, even if you don't think it's likely. That's what I mean when I say "agitate for change". If GW isn't behaving the way you want them to, then apply pressure to them to try to fix it. The fewer people applying pressure, the less effective it is - so just giving up is actively making things worse.

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

SecondTime wrote:
Ah, I think Starcraft is a much better game than 40K. Very different, but scouting alone makes it far more rewarding. I am helpless before you skew list without foreknowledge not available in 40K. If you had to build your Russes in real time, and hold me off with guardsmen first, I'd feel much better about it.

I agree it is a better game as a game, and I actually watch competitive games because I find it fascinating. But it isn't a good example of a "realistic" game, nor is the game play super true to the setting (insofar as the setting doesn't bend over backwards to meet the RTS half-way).

SecondTime wrote:
For verismilitude, I prefer things like World in Flames, but most Germanophiles don't enjoy historically accurate strategic wargames. Because they usually don't win.

I have heard those people called Wehraboos and I think that's hilarious.

Yeah, they fething hate me. My last World in Flames playgroup, I was banned from playing the United States. I was very, very efficient at destroying the Axis with the US. They thought it would go better if I were the Soviet Union. It didn't.


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 Unit1126PLL wrote:

SecondTime wrote:
"army design rules that can be used to reduce skew and rein in army construction "

None that GW is ever going to agree to use.

Well, with that attitude, you'll never get anything changed. It's okay to want for (and ask for) a better lot, even if you don't think it's likely. That's what I mean when I say "agitate for change". If GW isn't behaving the way you want them to, then apply pressure to them to try to fix it. The fewer people applying pressure, the less effective it is - so just giving up is actively making things worse.

Some changes seem doable, others not. They want to sell plastic. It's clear they've moved to "play what you want". It takes a late 7th ed level collapse to get their attention. So in a way, ignoring them and doing something else is the best agitation. If I run into a skew list in a tournament, I'll just accept that someone decided to take that kind of risk and lose. I don't plan for skew lists, because they struggle to run the table as is necessary. But in a non-tournament setting, I'll just decline the game as soon as I see the list.

If GW DID eliminate skew lists, I'd definitely give them a gold star for that. But as I said, there is no way they're doing that. They might get rid of a specific skew if its beating space marines. Because you know, we can't have space marines ever lose now.