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 catbarf wrote:
I would prefer to see actual interactivity in the game mechanics, rather than wallpaper over 30+ minute stretches of non-interaction by forcing the inactive player to mechanically resolve an outcome with no input of their own.

The 5e wound allocation game wasn't all that well received though, and playing the cards and command point combos were not the most new player friendly system.

I guess as long as it is turned based the best approach might just be to make it all faster.

A.T. wrote:

 catbarf wrote:
I would prefer to see actual interactivity in the game mechanics, rather than wallpaper over 30+ minute stretches of non-interaction by forcing the inactive player to mechanically resolve an outcome with no input of their own.

The 5e wound allocation game wasn't all that well received though, and playing the cards and command point combos were not the most new player friendly system.

I guess as long as it is turned based the best approach might just be to make it all faster.

Yeah. I think there might be some merit to just making turns fast enough that you don't mind being less active for a bit. There are definitely tons of viable ways to keep the defending player engaged during the attacking player's attacks, but at some point, it's possible to basically just end adding unnecessary busy work to create the illussion of interesting engagement.

I kind of miss Jink/ go to ground. It kept me watching the unfolding situation on the table. The order in which my opponent shot unit X at unit Y could change whether or not I'd want to jink with a certain unit, and the choice of jinking both gave me a sense of control/active defense while also lowering the overall lethality of my army and speeding it up too (the jinking unit wouldn't shooting next turn).

Maybe a simple non-stratagem-based reaction system would be a decent fit. Give people the option to hug cover or do a barrel roll or counter-attack (read: open themselves up to taking more damage in exchange for a chance to hurt the enemy back at the end of the phase), etc. Once a unit has reacted, that reaction is locked in. So the defending player is constantly making meaningful, interesting decisions, but those reactiosn are quick and easy to resolve and don't need a whole subsystem to pull off.

If you like saves, then a single defense roll incorporating toughness and save, like One Page Rules does it, gives you the save roll in fewer steps.

I'm not massively opposed to having multi-step processes, because they do allow for granularity, but having switched to OPR a few years ago I didn't feel I was losing much with the unified roll, it still felt like 40K to me.

I'm also not opposed to save mods, but as others have suggested it should be relatively toned down. Basic guns should generally not have save mod, it should be limited to guns with a hefty firepower.

But I also don't mind Marines not being invulnerable to small arms, because I've always thought that was silly and an over-exaggeration of the background, especially in the novels. Terminators are the ones that wade through small arms, Marines are just a lot tougher than other troops. But that ship is long sailed.

Edit to add: I've got a lot of nostalgia for the 3e version of the game and if I was gonna oldhammer it'd probably be the 3e to 5e versions I'd look at, but I always felt the way armour was done was poor. Probably rubbed in especially by me being an Ork player and being constantly reminded that my Boyz will never get a save unless they are in cover, and if they are in cover, they're probably moving slowly which means no assault. Constantly squeezed between those two choices made for interesting gameplay, but there were plenty of times where I felt very tired of it. It was clear from the commentaries at the time that they wanted Marines to get out of cover and play aggressively, which is why they made the cover saves generally worse than Marine armour, another example of them designing around Marines imo.

 Da Boss wrote:
It was clear from the commentaries at the time that they wanted Marines to get out of cover and play aggressively, which is why they made the cover saves generally worse than Marine armour, another example of them designing around Marines imo.

When they upped the cover saves in 5th it just made 4+ armour feel worthless.
Half of that was how easy it was to get though - I don't know if you remember/have seen the tyranid checkerboard formation? (alternating models from two units in one pile so that both groups are obscured by the other).

Cover was certainly designed around marines, specifically to get marines out of cover because it didn't benefit them anymore. But then starcannons, battlecannons, plasmaguns and so on saw marines right back into cover and transport vehicles with the rest.

That's because Marines define the metagame, so everyone brings whatever weapon in that edition is most effective against them and most points efficient.

I had fair success just playing horde orks because it meant those were mostly wasted points, but small arms still made mincemeat of mobs without careful play.

 Wyldhunt wrote:


Maybe a simple non-stratagem-based reaction system would be a decent fit. Give people the option to hug cover or do a barrel roll or counter-attack (read: open themselves up to taking more damage in exchange for a chance to hurt the enemy back at the end of the phase), etc. Once a unit has reacted, that reaction is locked in. So the defending player is constantly making meaningful, interesting decisions, but those reactiosn are quick and easy to resolve and don't need a whole subsystem to pull off.

Reaction systems , the way GW makes almost always end bad. Because they are either limited , only very specific armis/unit types can jink or worse it is like in HH, where shoting reactions mean one of your units can eat ( realisticaly more like 2-3 units) being shot three times by the same unit within the same turn cycle (their turn, your turn with reaction and then on over watch). This ends with shoting being very focused on being outside of LoS or having special rules that let you break the game (can't be shot at for a turn, can move and shot, mathemathicly hard to kill through stacking multi wounds&FnP etc).

Reactions are great for skirmish systems, because they both kill the boredom of not having anything to do on opponent turn and create tactical options. some weapon options could be not optimal on active turns, but very nice in reactions. But in a system where you have tens of models we already saw it ends. JSJ, fire and fade , mists aren't very liked by the opponent of armies that have them. Plus because of the leathality in the game, they turn any non clock game in to a measuring all ranges fiesta.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Maybe a simple non-stratagem-based reaction system would be a decent fit. Give people the option to hug cover or do a barrel roll or counter-attack

Go to ground - as oldhammer

Give ground - fall back d6", or init based, after taking heavy weapon fire only, with a compulsory regroup next round. A drawback to ATSKNF and fearless units being unable to use it.

Zeal... 4e Templars had a defensive attack ability but there wasn't any drawback to it when it was optional.

Generally not reacting was the counter-attack option as you got your turn next. Being able to dodge back from charges or small arms or getting overwatch on the round after you had already shot always felt like getting two bites at the cherry - especially when tau started with their supporting fire triple dip overwatch in 6th.

Overwatch as a reaction when you had given up your prior turn for it worked better IMO. 2e had the problem of it being something that could be triggered at any time rather than only when attacked so you could put your whole army onto overwatch and then take your entire shooting phase as and when models stepped out of cover or whenever else you wanted with no real drawback.

A.T. wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Maybe a simple non-stratagem-based reaction system would be a decent fit. Give people the option to hug cover or do a barrel roll or counter-attack

Go to ground - as oldhammer

Give ground - fall back d6", or init based, after taking heavy weapon fire only, with a compulsory regroup next round. A drawback to ATSKNF and fearless units being unable to use it.

Zeal... 4e Templars had a defensive attack ability but there wasn't any drawback to it when it was optional.

Generally not reacting was the counter-attack option as you got your turn next. Being able to dodge back from charges or small arms or getting overwatch on the round after you had already shot always felt like getting two bites at the cherry - especially when tau started with their supporting fire triple dip overwatch in 6th.

Overwatch as a reaction when you had given up your prior turn for it worked better IMO. 2e had the problem of it being something that could be triggered at any time rather than only when attacked so you could put your whole army onto overwatch and then take your entire shooting phase as and when models stepped out of cover or whenever else you wanted with no real drawback.

I could see something like the above working.

Give Ground would basically be the new necron Star Shatter reaction move. Basically, you have to let your opponent shoot you (and resolve those attacks) before you activate it, but then you can defensively try to hide behind some terrain. So it's less protective (in some ways) than JSJ, but it can still save your bacon. If doing this made you give up the following turn's shooting/charges/actions, it could be an interesting decision for keeping a unit alive after they poked their heads out to fight.

Not sure about Zeal. I was kind of picturing something like a shoot-on-death mechanic similar to hellblasters, but declaring you're using it means the enemy adds +1 to wound rolls while resolving their attacks for the rest of the phase or something. Sort of a "go down swinging" option. But simply *not* reacting and getting to do your turn normally probably works too.

Putting your whole army on overwatch could be an issue, although one with counterplay. If you've played the 40k Battle Sector game, you can stick your whole army on overwatch, but then they automatically spend that overwatch on whatever the first thing to come into range is. So if you have a bunch of lascannon heavy weapons guys on OW, they can eaisly end up wasting it against that first wave of gretchen instead of saving it for the deff dread stomping up behind them. Translating something like that to 40k, it would potentially add a bit of value to your cheap canon fodder units. Like, Thousand Sons might want to invest in some cheap cultists instead of extra flamer rubrics if they can force their opponent to waste shooting on the cheap guys.

But I'm just spitballing. Generally I've been playing with the idea of ditching stratagems in favor of army-wide rules and "maneuvers," and reactions kind of tie into that.

Alternatively, we could alter the turn strucutre to not be IGoUGo, but that is its own can of worms and well-trod ground.

A.T. wrote:The 5e wound allocation game wasn't all that well received though, and playing the cards and command point combos were not the most new player friendly system.

Karol wrote:Reaction systems , the way GW makes almost always end bad.

The implication that the only options are 'how GW does it now' or 'how GW has done it before' is as tiring as ever.

I was thinking more along the lines of some flavor of alternating activation, phased activation (a la MESBG), or a reaction system along the lines of Dust, Infinity, or SST. Either reduce the duration of a single activation impulse before the pendulum swings back to the other player, or make the other player 'reactive' rather than 'inactive'.

Or if you have to keep pure IGOUGO, then yeah, speed up the turns so it isn't no-go-ahead-I'm-just-making-a-sandwich levels of downtime. And don't pretend that giving the other guy brainless busywork constitutes 'engagement'. You want IGOUGO, you can have IGOUGO, just don't make it tedious to play on the assumption that I'm six years old and getting to throw dice every couple minutes is enough to keep me entertained.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
I kind of miss Jink/ go to ground. It kept me watching the unfolding situation on the table. The order in which my opponent shot unit X at unit Y could change whether or not I'd want to jink with a certain unit, and the choice of jinking both gave me a sense of control/active defense while also lowering the overall lethality of my army and speeding it up too (the jinking unit wouldn't shooting next turn).

As a point of reference, Battlefleet Gothic is a GW game that is mostly IGOUGO (ordnance moves in both turns, but that's fairly minor), but any time you come under attack, you have the option to attempt to Brace For Impact, which gives you a 4+ save against all damage- outright cutting damage sustained in half- but comes at some pretty hefty costs to what that ship can do in the next turn. It means that as the inactive player, you still are paying attention to what's going on and weighing the risks. It also means that combat is normally resolved by the player making the attacks, unless Brace for Impact is invoked, and then the defender gets a save.

Beats the heck out of adding a dice handoff to every single attack for... no reason, except to make the other guy feel like he's involved in what is still a one-sided mechanic.

 catbarf wrote:

Or if you have to keep pure IGOUGO, then yeah, speed up the turns so it isn't no-go-ahead-I'm-just-making-a-sandwich levels of downtime. And don't pretend that giving the other guy brainless busywork constitutes 'engagement'. You want IGOUGO, you can have IGOUGO, just don't make it tedious to play on the assumption that I'm six years old and getting to throw dice every couple minutes is enough to keep me entertained.

FWIW, I play a fair bit of 1k and 1500 point games, and the downtime definitely chafes less in those smaller games. So simply speeding up player turns a bit might do a fair bit to help the issue.

As a point of reference, Battlefleet Gothic is a GW game that is mostly IGOUGO (ordnance moves in both turns, but that's fairly minor), but any time you come under attack, you have the option to attempt to Brace For Impact, which gives you a 4+ save against all damage- outright cutting damage sustained in half- but comes at some pretty hefty costs to what that ship can do in the next turn. It means that as the inactive player, you still are paying attention to what's going on and weighing the risks. It also means that combat is normally resolved by the player making the attacks, unless Brace for Impact is invoked, and then the defender gets a save.

Beats the heck out of adding a dice handoff to every single attack for... no reason, except to make the other guy feel like he's involved in what is still a one-sided mechanic.

Yeah, I think a mechanic that captures that same feeling would work pretty well. Jink kind of did that for me. But of course, now that units generally have armor saves if not invuln saves means that just giving everything an X+ save when they give up their shooting the following turn is less of a one-size-fits-all solution than it used to be.

I will say that the dice handoff probably make a bit of sense. I have enough trouble getting my opponent to remember something like a to-hit or to-wound penalty sometimes. If they were also in charge of remembering my saves and knowing which one was better to use, I imagine there would be non-zero number of innocent mistakes as a result of them simply not knowing my units as well as I know my units.

catbarf wrote:... any time you come under attack, you have the option to attempt to Brace For Impact, which gives you a 4+ save against all damage- outright cutting damage sustained in half- but comes at some pretty hefty costs to what that ship can do in the next turn.

Go to ground. Unfortunately it was a small benefit and a harsh penalty on active units while being a significant boost for inactive units dug in on objectives. A little less punitive in 6th/7th.

A.T. wrote:

catbarf wrote:... any time you come under attack, you have the option to attempt to Brace For Impact, which gives you a 4+ save against all damage- outright cutting damage sustained in half- but comes at some pretty hefty costs to what that ship can do in the next turn.

Go to ground. Unfortunately it was a small benefit and a harsh penalty on active units while being a significant boost for inactive units dug in on objectives. A little less punitive in 6th/7th.

Sure. But as catbarf mentioned earlier, we don't have to do things exactly the same way as before. Brace for Impact and Jink are both examples of reaction mechanics that feel good to use and worked pretty well in their day.

Nomeny wrote:
What I don't get is why Andy Chambers didn't go for something like WS vs WS or S vs T, so it was AP vs AV.

I did exactly that and it's worked perfectly.
E.g. -1 save mod and 3+ save = AP4 and AR4. It makes introducing armour better than 2+ save extremely easy, and allows you to model weapons with bad penetration as well.

I also converted 2nd edition 40K to play with alternate unit activation and no phases and it really didn't take much. No one missed not rolling armour saves.

I honestly hate unit reactions and all the extra out of phase extra action special rules I see in current 40K. It's as though the more you are getting pounded the more actions you get to take, while an un-threatened unit with a great vantage point shoots once and watches.

2nd edition overwatch is something I heard many complaints about but never saw a problem with. I mostly heard people complain about it in retrospect after the launch of 3rd edition; something for people to denigrate the previous editions rules over. Same with the AP system vs armour saves. GW staff would use it as a selling point; your Marines get their full save!
Any armour save shortcomings of 2nd edition were with calibration, not with the mechanic. While binary AP as a mechanic is inherently unbalanceable.

Oktoglokk wrote:
2nd edition overwatch is something I heard many complaints about but never saw a problem with. I mostly heard people complain about it in retrospect after the launch of 3rd edition; something for people to denigrate the previous editions rules over.

Keeping in mind that I was 10-12 years old, I remember it being a problem once people "discovered it".

"I'll put this unit in hard cover on overwatch."
"Okay... well I don't want to get shot, and if I run forward and shoot you I'm getting so many negatives to hit I'll probably do nothing. So I'll also bunker down and go into overwatch."
"..."
"..."
"..."
"Well this doesn't seem great."

Arguably resolved by having big LOS-blocking terrain pieces to break up firing lines (the more things change etc) - but tables often didn't have that sort of terrain. So despite only having a 90 degree firing arc you could just mow stuff down that tried to cross no man's land. Which didn't feel very fun.

It was better in Necromunda.

Tyel wrote:
Keeping in mind that I was 10-12 years old, I remember it being a problem once people "discovered it".

"I'll put this unit in hard cover on overwatch."
"Okay... well I don't want to get shot, and if I run forward and shoot you I'm getting so many negatives to hit I'll probably do nothing. So I'll also bunker down and go into overwatch."
"..."
"..."
"..."
"Well this doesn't seem great."

Arguably resolved by having big LOS-blocking terrain pieces to break up firing lines (the more things change etc) - but tables often didn't have that sort of terrain. So despite only having a 90 degree firing arc you could just mow stuff down that tried to cross no man's land. Which didn't feel very fun.

It was better in Necromunda.

The official motto back then was "The more terrain the better the game!"

The corollary to 'I can't move/attack you without getting shot at' is why the heck should you be able to?
I set up my unit in cover with a good field of fire and forgo my turn to be able to shoot in response to your actions - I see nothing wrong with that.
The main complaint was that this made for static games but I really never saw that. Yes it blocked avenues of unmolested movement but that was the point!

You have line of sight blocking terrain, you have fast units to close with the enemy, you have armoured units to take a chance against heavy weapons fire, you have high ballistic skill units and templates to snipe and blast units out of hard cover.

I don't really sympathise with not having enough terrain either. If you don't have enough you stack books on your table - I don't know if people read any more but people tended to have plenty of books in the '90s. Or use tin cans or rocks from the garden or smash a polystyrene box - half my 30+ year old terrain is smashed polystyrene.

The lack of terrain on the table is an issue/feature of current 40K I rarely consider - I still think of things in terms of 2nd edition terrain density.
I don't expect that armies should perform equally in different terrain densities. Some would benefit, some would suffer.

Encouraging less terrain would be a great way to sell more marines in the binary AP paradigm though.

Wyldhunt wrote:Sure. But as catbarf mentioned earlier, we don't have to do things exactly the same way as before. Brace for Impact and Jink are both examples of reaction mechanics that feel good to use and worked pretty well in their day.

Right, the reason I bring up BFI as a comparison is because it is significant and game-wide. It gives your ships a flat 4+ save against all damage, and any ship or squadron can do it. When you have that choice available, you pay close attention during your opponent's shooting phase, weighing whether it's worth reducing your shooting by half next turn and losing out on special orders. It's a constantly present tactical consideration.

Go To Ground wasn't significant in the same way- a +1 to your save at the cost of doing nothing for a turn is highly punishing, something you'd only use in exceptional circumstances, like having a unit camping an objective. Since it isn't worth doing most of the time, it isn't a strong tactical consideration.

Whereas Jink giving you a flat save (at the cost of then hitting on 6s) was a significant ability, but limited only to certain units. No jetbikes, flyers, or skimmers? No jink. Similarly, while HH2.0 has a reaction mechanic, it being limited to one unit at a time limits its utility and has some weird consequences (eg big units react far more often than small ones).

A strong reaction mechanic is one that is actually worth doing, and applies to any unit, giving you additional capability in your opponent's turn. But there's more to it than that, because...

Tyel wrote:

Oktoglokk wrote:
2nd edition overwatch is something I heard many complaints about but never saw a problem with. I mostly heard people complain about it in retrospect after the launch of 3rd edition; something for people to denigrate the previous editions rules over.

Keeping in mind that I was 10-12 years old, I remember it being a problem once people "discovered it".

"I'll put this unit in hard cover on overwatch."
"Okay... well I don't want to get shot, and if I run forward and shoot you I'm getting so many negatives to hit I'll probably do nothing. So I'll also bunker down and go into overwatch."
"..."
"..."
"..."
"Well this doesn't seem great."

Arguably resolved by having big LOS-blocking terrain pieces to break up firing lines (the more things change etc) - but tables often didn't have that sort of terrain. So despite only having a 90 degree firing arc you could just mow stuff down that tried to cross no man's land. Which didn't feel very fun.

It was better in Necromunda.

...A big part of the issue was that Overwatch often didn't involve any sort of tradeoff; if you were in a good defensive position but had no LOS, you'd just go on overwatch. The enemy pops up, you take your free shot at -1 to hit, then he gets to shoot, and then it's your turn again and you can shoot again with no penalty. If, instead, overwatch meant not getting to shoot on your next turn, that'd be a much harder decision- you'd be essentially taking a -1 to hit penalty to shift your shooting to before the enemy shoots. In some systems I've seen this mechanic defined as 'hasty fire' or similar.

A good reaction system is one that gives you either situational benefits (like going to ground) or the chance to do something now (like overwatch fire) at the cost of reduced capability later; it sets up a tension where you have to balance responding to your opponent against losing initiative, getting stuck just reacting to an enemy that's gotten inside your OODA loop. The 2nd Ed overwatch mechanic was instead sacrificing capability now to do something later, which is a subtle but important distinction.

Now, the 2nd Ed style overwatch is reasonably realistic in asserting that a defender with a clear field of fire and time to prepare has a strong advantage. But for a wargame, you need either strong incentive for one side to just eat the overwatch (eg, a scenario where the attacker has more points but a hard time limit), or a mechanic to shut down overwatch by suppressing the defenders (hello, indirect fires). Otherwise you get the much-derided stalemate of 2nd where neither side is willing to step out and get shot, but also there's no other option for dealing with it.

^exalting for points and clarity of expression.

Game-wide abilities also have the side benefit of not being "gotchas" because everybody is aware of them.

 catbarf wrote:
Right, the reason I bring up BFI as a comparison is because it is significant and game-wide. It gives your ships a flat 4+ save against all damage, and any ship or squadron can do it. When you have that choice available, you pay close attention during your opponent's shooting phase, weighing whether it's worth reducing your shooting by half next turn and losing out on special orders. It's a constantly present tactical consideration.

I'd agree that having these things be universal is important - because it becomes a feature you build the game around.

GW have this habit of thinking up some new ability - and handing it to one unit (or faction). Since it amends the game's rules it then turns out to be almost impossible to value properly.
Jink is a great example of how not to do these abilities for that reason. (I accept "7th was broken" can't be the explanation for everything - but it was.)

Really though it comes down to what you want your game to simulate. I feel a major issue in 40k is that the game is so short (in terms of turns/actions) that anything that takes multiple turns to do is often not practical.

So for example say you are hunkered down in overwatch.
So I need to bring my "indirect fires/overwatch breaking unit" across the table (potentially a turn).
It then needs to shoot at full effect to break your overwatch (another turn).
Finally my other unit(s) can safely sprint across no-mans land and either inflict significant damage with close range shooting or assault (a third turn).

And potentially that's only breaking into your first line, as opposed to the more juicy stuff behind.

You can obviously speed things up by giving units lots of movement and range. Having opponents deploy very close to each other. Have no/fewer modifiers to shooting (you could argue this has happened every edition for decades by now) and long charge distances etc. But all that brings its own issues as we've seen. Suddenly overwatch stops being an issue because you can just zoom to the other side of the board and delete whatever you like.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Brace for Impact and Jink are both examples of reaction mechanics that feel good to use and worked pretty well in their day.

What are your thoughts on 5e jink(turbo boost) vs 7e jink?

7e was reactive, give up your next shooting phase to get an immediate 4+ cover save.

5e was proactive, give up your current shooting/assault phase and make a minimum move to set yourself up for the next round.


I kind of preferred the proactive version myself, but then 7e did have a stronger emphasis on stuff entering the board that you had to react to rather than units in place that you were playing against.

Tyel wrote:
I feel a major issue in 40k is that the game is so short (in terms of turns/actions) that anything that takes multiple turns to do is often not practical.

Totally valid, but IMO the issue there isn't the turn count per se. It's more the extremely limited number of interaction points that comes from 40K's strict phase-based IGOUGO.

In an AA system, you could have a unit go on overwatch, get hit with indirect fire, and then get bypassed by the unit it was trying to guard against, all in the same turn. Even within an IGOUGO paradigm, if you picked a unit and resolved all its activity for the turn before moving on to the next, you could still sequence your actions- unit A shoots to remove overwatch, unit B moves in. Individual units might not be doing any more on any given turn, but freeform sequencing allows for more complex coordination that doesn't take multiple turns to resolve basic fire and maneuver. But nobody wants to sit there and get wombo-comboed, so throw in a reaction system as discussed, and oh hey, look at that, a dynamic and interactive wargame that doesn't feel like it's from the 80s.

And yeah, obviously, we're getting at some more fundamental issues than the AP system or who rolls your dice... but I don't think the issues that are being brought up are self-contained problems with simple fixes, either; more surface-level manifestations of deeper issues.

A.T. wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Brace for Impact and Jink are both examples of reaction mechanics that feel good to use and worked pretty well in their day.

What are your thoughts on 5e jink(turbo boost) vs 7e jink?

7e was reactive, give up your next shooting phase to get an immediate 4+ cover save.

5e was proactive, give up your current shooting/assault phase and make a minimum move to set yourself up for the next round.


I kind of preferred the proactive version myself, but then 7e did have a stronger emphasis on stuff entering the board that you had to react to rather than units in place that you were playing against.

I liked both in their time but probably preferred Jink to flatout/turboboost saves.

Flatout saves required you to actually move fast, which made it feel like you zooming across the battlefield while enemies failed to track you. In contrast, jink felt more like you were doing a barrel roll while basically staying still.

Jink being reactive meant that you could use it even on turn 1. So my dark eldar raiders weren't just caught sitting still if my opponent won the roll-off to go first; they were on their way to the enemy and could dodge to the side if the enemy fire started getting close. It also generally felt better to know that you were giving up your shooting because you were actively being shot at. Proactively going flat out to keep your tanks alive was usually something you did not because you wanted to but because you had to. Like, the whole 5e cliche of eldar flying in circles all game and then parking on an objective at the end was true, but it was born from a sense that our tanks didn't shoot well enough to reliably do damage (they hit on 4+ at the time), so the safe bet was to spend all game keeping your 4+ cover save active.

I think the best version of this might have been 7th edition corsairs, where they had invuln (cover?) saves that got better based on how fast your vehicles moved, with flatout and deepstriking offering the best saves. It created a meaningful trade-off between slowing down to shoot more (and stay in a better position) or moving farther/faster to keep your defenses up.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
...but it was born from a sense that our tanks didn't shoot well enough to reliably do damage (they hit on 4+ at the time), so the safe bet was to spend all game keeping your 4+ cover save active

Serpents hit on 4+, falcons on 3+.
And the warp hunter automatically - 125pts for an AP2 extended range template or mid-range barrage d-cannon. I think it may have been 115 in the initial release, could you have imagined that thing having been released a few years earlier under 4e skimmer rules...?


But yes not being able to count as moving in the first turn was a problem was a problem for some units. Smoke launchers were like that too - first turn barrages would have been quite a bit less deadly (and deployment quite a bit faster) if you could have put your transports front and centre under a smokescreen when going second.

I think my dislike of the reactive jink compared to turbo boost was the same as the need for it. 40k had an increasing number of units that would just arrive on the board and unload with no counter play except for reactions like jink... then again those same units would get to unload and also get the full benefits of jinking, aircraft never had to pick between making an attack run that left them vulnerable or flying evasively onto the battlefield.

Jink and cover saves in general were 'patches' for the game lacking (and not wanting to add) modifiers for hit rolls/armour etc. Special rules to add for a deficiency in the core concept, making something more complex rather than less because of the downsizing of game mechanics.