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It seems currently people only take full-payload manticores, I feel it should be changed that something getting -1 to hit from dense terrain should lose their bonus vs things that can fire without the need of line of sight, ie artillery, this would also help give imperial guard a much needed buff.

I can see this being a problem with hiveguard, but hiveguard are often an auto-include and need their own problems resolved

Artillery and Blasts should cause splash damage.

So the damage carries on throughout the models in the unit.

I think it would make sense that when firing blast weapons at units over 5 they shouldn't receive the -1 to hit

bat702 wrote:
It seems currently people only take full-payload manticores, I feel it should be changed that something getting -1 to hit from dense terrain should lose their bonus vs things that can fire without the need of line of sight, ie artillery, this would also help give imperial guard a much needed buff.

I can see this being a problem with hiveguard, but hiveguard are often an auto-include and need their own problems resolved

This is probably the sort of post that belongs in the Proposed Rules forum.

Seems like a reasonable idea. I'm not sure it's accurate to say that artillery in general is especially in need of buffing. Eldar and ork artillery are pretty decent, and thunderfires were terrifying last edition. But this seems like a fluffy change that would make sense for indirect fire weapons.

I wouldn't worry too much about letting hiveguard ignore the to-hit peanlty. They don't have eyes to be confused by cover in the first place; their ammo finds the target mid-flight as I understand it.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Brutus_Apex wrote:
Artillery and Blasts should cause splash damage.

So the damage carries on throughout the models in the unit.

Eh. Then you can't have an anti-tank gun that isn't also an anti-horde gun though. A plasma cannon hasn't traditionally been all that great at clearing hordes of orks. With that change, an overcharged cannon would suddenly kill twice as many orks as before. Or to stick to the guard examples, boosting the anti-horde abilities of something like a basilisk suddenly means that there's less differentiation between its anti-horde power and that of a dedicated anti-horde unit like a wyvern. You risk stepping on each others' toes, basically.

A big problem with powerful blasts at the moment is that they make better anti-tank guns than anything.
People don't take Manticores to kill scored of Orks like they did in 5th, they take Manticores to kill tanks.

That's not something that can be a quick fix given the current blast rules.
You could fix it by ruling something like blasts can't cause more hits than the enemy unit had models. But that would require a general rebalance of blasts. Because d6 hits is pitiful.

 kirotheavenger wrote:
A big problem with powerful blasts at the moment is that they make better anti-tank guns than anything.
People don't take Manticores to kill scored of Orks like they did in 5th, they take Manticores to kill tanks.

That's not something that can be a quick fix given the current blast rules.
You could fix it by ruling something like blasts can't cause more hits than the enemy unit had models. But that would require a general rebalance of blasts. Because d6 hits is pitiful.

It's a fairly easy fix to make it so certain artillery is good against infantry. Give them a special rule, which effectively causes splash damage against infantry and infantry only (maybe cavalry and bikes etc as well).

You then only give this to certain weapons.

Demolisher cannon no, basilisk yes, manticore yes, wyvern yes, vanquisher no etc etc

AM Players take full payload manticores because they are head and shoulders above any other option.

All kind of artilleries were harshly costed in 9th compared to 8th because in 8th shooting at non-los targets was a useless rule (if you didn't house rule), while in 9th it is an extremely good rule to have.

Right now, you take artilleries only if you need the no-los shooting since you pay so much for it.

Full payload manticores are an exception in that they are so OP (relatively to the other options) that they are also taken for regular AT role.

Don't consider FP manticores to be artilleries. They are AT platforms, which also happen to be artilleries.

what sort of splash damage are we talking?
You could resolve a shot against every model with X" of a point, but I don't think GW will want to return to that on any large scale.

You could do something like "small blast" and "large blast" which gets an attack for every 2 models or every 1 model in the target unit respectively. Although that would really punish large units something fierce.

Eh. Then you can't have an anti-tank gun that isn't also an anti-horde gun though. A plasma cannon hasn't traditionally been all that great at clearing hordes of orks. With that change, an overcharged cannon would suddenly kill twice as many orks as before. Or to stick to the guard examples, boosting the anti-horde abilities of something like a basilisk suddenly means that there's less differentiation between its anti-horde power and that of a dedicated anti-horde unit like a wyvern. You risk stepping on each others' toes, basically.

I see what you are saying. You'd probably have to add the splash damage into the weapon profile, or have dedicated weapon types. Anti-tank would only cause multi wound against vehicles. Anti-infantry would only cause multiple wounds against infantry etc.

I like the idea of artillery being both anti-tank and anti-horde, it feels fluffy. Honestly tho the guard are in need of buffs, and buffing artillery is a good way to do that, and turning guard artillery into hitting on 5's hurts alot

 Brutus_Apex wrote:
Artillery and Blasts should cause splash damage.

So the damage carries on throughout the models in the unit.

There are some weapons that have splash damage. Lighning psyick power for SW, and burba bomber strap for Orks. Probably more as well.

Splash damage?

Blast templates would make blast weapons do what they should be doing better than they do it now.

bat702 wrote:
I like the idea of artillery being both anti-tank and anti-horde, it feels fluffy.

Eh, it's not really. 155mm artillery (the big stuff) will shred and exposed infantry unit but anything short of a direct hit on the roof won't bother a tank. And hitting a roof with indirect fire is *extremely* difficult. Anything smaller? Even a direct hit probably won't bother a tank.

Plus, large artillery like Manticores or Basilisks aren't even anti-horde at the moment. You'll only get a few shots, which is pitiful given the general cost of the weapon. They're passable anti-tank/anti-heavy-infantry guns and not a lot else.

 kirotheavenger wrote:

bat702 wrote:
I like the idea of artillery being both anti-tank and anti-horde, it feels fluffy.

Eh, it's not really. 155mm artillery (the big stuff) will shred and exposed infantry unit but anything short of a direct hit on the roof won't bother a tank. And hitting a roof with indirect fire is *extremely* difficult. Anything smaller? Even a direct hit probably won't bother a tank.

Plus, large artillery like Manticores or Basilisks aren't even anti-horde at the moment. You'll only get a few shots, which is pitiful given the general cost of the weapon. They're passable anti-tank/anti-heavy-infantry guns and not a lot else.

its kind of silly to think artillery cant land a shell on top of a tank or a regiment of tanks in the 40k millennia, I know technology is somewhat backwards but not completely, if space marine stuff can have machine spirits, pretty sure the guard can land a massive shell on top of or right next to a tank, even if both are moving. its not completely ww2 technology in the 40k millennia

 kirotheavenger wrote:

bat702 wrote:
I like the idea of artillery being both anti-tank and anti-horde, it feels fluffy.

Eh, it's not really. 155mm artillery (the big stuff) will shred and exposed infantry unit but anything short of a direct hit on the roof won't bother a tank. And hitting a roof with indirect fire is *extremely* difficult. Anything smaller? Even a direct hit probably won't bother a tank.

This isn't true. The US did testing in '88 that showed a direct hit was 100% mission kill and strikes within 30m could disable a tank. Tracks, gun barrels, sights, crews, and engines are all vulnerable.

Those 1988 tests were also conducted against the aluminium armoured M113 as part of the 'armoured targets', unfortunately I haven't found a way to read the original document to know exactly how the damage was spread out.
But I'm aware of the assessment and stand by my statement.

Maybe they do have in-flight guided artillery shells that can lock into a tank, we're developing/using those at the moment. But the Imperial Guard's artillery is portrayed as very WW2-esque, and I think that's better for the game anyway. It keeps a rock-paper-scissors dynamic where you still need to bring anti-tank guns and can't just rely on artillery for everything.

In either case artillery needs to be effective against soft targets as well. At the moment it's entirely wasted there.

 kirotheavenger wrote:
Those 1988 tests were also conducted against the aluminium armoured M113 as part of the 'armoured targets', unfortunately I haven't found a way to read the original document to know exactly how the damage was spread out.
But I'm aware of the assessment and stand by my statement.

Maybe they do have in-flight guided artillery shells that can lock into a tank, we're developing/using those at the moment. But the Imperial Guard's artillery is portrayed as very WW2-esque, and I think that's better for the game anyway. It keeps a rock-paper-scissors dynamic where you still need to bring anti-tank guns and can't just rely on artillery for everything.

In either case artillery needs to be effective against soft targets as well. At the moment it's entirely wasted there.

You also realize that armor doesn't matter when it comes to damaging soft external components such as gun barrels, tracks, vision blocks, antennas and the like. There's also the fact that even modern tanks like the M1 Abrams with modern armor packages still have weak spots, for example, the Abrams has spots on its side armor that can be defeated by 20mm rounds resulting in the tank being disabled. It's likely, simply due to the realities of design trade-offs, that vehicles in 40k suffer many of these same issues. This isn't even to mention that 40k has insanely powerful explosives far beyond anything we have. I even did the math for it years ago:

"We know that the Space Marines have been described as using coin-sized grenades before, now if we assume that coin is a rather large one like a quarter we get a maximum volume of 0.809 cubic centimeters, assuming that the explosive masses twice that of TNT we get a total explosive mass of 2.69 grams. A weak grenade like the RGD-5 explodes with 506 joules of energy so doing the basic math we get 188 joules per gram. Scaling from a diagram of a bolter round and replacing the solid core with explosives to show an explosive bolter round we get a volume of 1.77 cubic centimeters using the same mass as before we get 5.88 grams of explosive exploding with an energy of 1,105 kilojoules. The antipersonnel warhead for the RPG-7 carries 210 grams of explosive, assuming RDX, a common military explosive that roughly equates to 1,550 kilojoules of explosive. I was only off by 1.4x and that was just to give an example."

So if a bolter round can pack a similar punch to an RPG what might the 40k version of a 155mm shell do?

Any attempt to use actual numbers given in publications is doomed to failure - according to the old Imperial Armour books Predators have armour equivalent to 200mm of steel.
I'm sure you know as well as I Canadian that that would be impressive for WW2, but is fairly negligible by today's standards for a battle tank. That's AV13 in old money, pretty impressive and fairly standard for most factions tanks.
Not to mention it isn't the explosive capacity of the RPG that kills tanks, it's the hypersonic metal jet it forms.

You could engineer all sorts of scenarios where sci-fi artillery is an effective anti-tank weapon.
You don't even need to go very far in the future to imagine guided HEAT shells that survey the battlefield, identify, and engage armoured targets themselves.
So I'm not going to sit here and argue it makes no sense at all for artillery to destroy tanks.

The most important factor in why I say artillery shouldn't be effective anti-tank guns is gameplay. IMO it works and feels better if artillery is effective at destroying infantry, and anti-tank guns are effective at killing tanks.

I can't imagine an earth-shaker cannon being less effective than a leman-russ battle-cannon at taking down tanks, but fair enough I could see guard artillery not so much being needed for squishy orcs but perhaps something more big and lurking, like chaos space marines sized threats, ie killing elite infantry, but yes I truely feel guard artillery should be versatile, according to the lore their artillery is one of its most stand out features and the thing every guards man loves seeing the most, the sound of earth-shaker's going off puts them at ease. A buff to artillery would be great for guard and we should all know guard are in need of buffs, so I really think removing that -1 to hit for them would be great, if they did go up to d6 damage then they would be anti-tank platforms I agree, but they should also be versatile, would be nice perhaps if they rerolled 1's for damage, give them some more anti-marine punch

bat702 wrote:
I can't imagine an earth-shaker cannon being less effective than a leman-russ battle-cannon at taking down tanks, but fair enough I could see guard artillery not so much being needed for squishy orcs but perhaps something more big and lurking, like chaos space marines sized threats, ie killing elite infantry, but yes I truely feel guard artillery should be versatile, according to the lore their artillery is one of its most stand out features and the thing every guards man loves seeing the most, the sound of earth-shaker's going off puts them at ease. A buff to artillery would be great for guard and we should all know guard are in need of buffs, so I really think removing that -1 to hit for them would be great, if they did go up to d6 damage then they would be anti-tank platforms I agree, but they should also be versatile, would be nice perhaps if they rerolled 1's for damage, give them some more anti-marine punch

Killing tanks with artillery is something that is more some spin that in reality never works out that well.

Giving guard BS4+ S9/10 multi shot weapons any improvement against vehicals doesnt make artillary better. It just vehicals even less viable when they are already struggling. That GW has alrwady essentially had to admit this by handing out core and -1 damage buffs makes the idea that Guard think they need more ways to make vehicals unviable baffling.

Hope you like playing 2k worth of infantry.

I suspect what we are more likely to see is less random damage Incould see earthshakers becoming D3 much like I expect battle cannons to be, as that's what you're going to need yo kill your avarage marine.

meh, if you think earth-shakers weren't meant to damage tanks as well, that sounds fubar to me. but dealing at most 3 damage on d3 is hardly going to ever be "anti-tank" and guard need buffs, saying that tanks have a problem has nothing to do with guard and everything to do with stuff like entropy cannons,multi-melta sisters of battle, and ofc the very dumb founding eradicators, also stuff like dreadnoughts with -1 damage that can shred a tank in melee

As guard, the most important artillery change I could ask for is shortening the target range when it comes to Master of Ordnance from 36" to 24". With the new board sizes, it makes this officer nigh useless.

 RegularGuy wrote:
As guard, the most important artillery change I could ask for is shortening the target range when it comes to Master of Ordnance from 36" to 24". With the new board sizes, it makes this officer nigh useless.

Was he even good on larger boards? I seem to recall these MoO type effects being eternally poor choices due to having too many downsides to have a practical use.