Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

I'm not a big fan of 2W elites in Heresy. It means that the basic infantry stand absolutely no chance in hell of even holding a candle in melee to them. When your chainsword is hitting on 5s, wounding on 4s, bouncing off a 2+ save, and you still need *two* wounds through to actually do anything noteworthy you rapidly approach the statistical envelope where your basic infantry is doing absolutely bugger all.

Same basic story in shooting as well. HH2.0 had a reputation for everyone spamming super OP lascannons, but that's as much to do with the fact that lascannons were pretty much the only guns effective at killing 2+/2W elites.
Your basic bitch boltguns need not even apply.

2W elites really contributed to the general zeitgeist in 30k now where elites do *all* of the fighting and basic bitch troops just try and hide. *Maybe* they try and have a little scrub-fight with some other basic bitches whilst the actual fighters are distracted.




Automatically Appended Next Post:
In terms of initiative... I've always hated it. The idea that one side just sits there staring slackjawed whilst their entire squad is cut down because they're just that fraction of a second slower witted just seemed like absolute nonsense to me.
It also just felt really uninteractive because initiative is basically a faction-stat. Eldar fight before Space Marines who fight before Orks, okay cool.

If I were to design the game initative wouldn't exist, whatever it's trying to represent would be rolled in WS. Which maybe I'd separate out into offensive and defensive stats. I'd probably do the same to shooting/BS. But that's a dramatic project.

If we're talking suggestions for how best to use initiative in a less radical overhaul, I would propose initiative allowing you to swing once per model for every point of initiative difference.
IE if you're +2 initiative on your opponent, each model can swing twice.
Although this might get weird with units of mixed initiative (eg half thunderhammers, half powerswords), but those are pretty rare in 40k so just take the majority and shrug it off I guess.

All remaining attacks are resolved simultaneously


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 AnomanderRake wrote:

 kirotheavenger wrote:
For abstract-height terrain, you can kind of represent the advantage of elevation better with a rule something like the below;

The attacker can ignore terrain smaller than themselves if it is closer to them than the defender. This represents the fact that, when looking down, you can see over stuff closer to you a lot better than you can stuff further away.

A lot of hex and counter historical games can get really detailed. I've even seen some suggest pulling out grid paper to sketch the relative heights and obstructions and draw your angle. But that's a bit much I think.

I'll have to draw out some diagrams and check, but I like the thought. The issue at the moment is that in my original formulation (terrain has to be equal to or higher than both attacker/defender to block LoS) it's too easy for elevated models in the deployment zone to see the whole table, but in the modified formulation (terrain equal to or higher than either attacker or defender blocks LoS) models on a roof can't see infantry past infantry.

Let's try;

DaRules wrote:
Obstructions equal to or greater than the total height of the attacker/defender blocks LoS when it is closer to that unit respectively
*For the purposes of determining the total height of either an obstruction or a unit, use the height value of the unit plus the terrain it is standing upon

Or perhaps another way to write the same thing could be;

DaRules wrote:
Obstructions with a total height equal/greater than the attacker block LoS when closer to the attacker.
Obstructions with a total height equal/greater than the defender block LoS when closer to the attacker.
*For the purposes of determining the total height of either an obstruction or a unit, use the height value of the unit plus the terrain it is standing upon

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . | . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . |||||||


Covers this situation well, as both units will be blocked from one another.
I added it to work both ways so that a situation like this still blocks LoS;

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . | . . . . . . |||||||

Now in this scenario we've moved the wall closer to the building. It now doesn't block LoS in either direction. To do that it'd need to be twice as high.

Although I do envision the scenario of where you have a wide piece of terrain slap bang in the middle, so although it might be closer to one side it's still within the half range to either side. So perhaps rather than saying "closest to X" you'd have to say "within the first/second half of the distance to the target" or similar.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Maybe a bad example on my part. I guess I'm just picturing scenarios where two dedicated melee units clash, but one unit is sufficiently killy and with sufficiently high initiative to wipe out the other unit unscathed. Something like 10 incubi versus 10 vanguard vets, for instance. The incubi would presumably be higher initiative and would also be good enough at killing marines to have a decent chance of wiping all the vanguard vets out before they rolled a single attack. Incubi are impressive, but it feels wrong for them to get into melee with an elite dedicated melee unit (like vanguard vets) and not take a single casualty in return.

From what I recall, vanguard vets back then uniquely had charge out of deep strike, so they could choose their targets. They should not be allowing the incubi to charge them lightly.

The incubi are also very very fragile to shooting, even in comparison to the VanVets. This is where I'd genuinely say combined arms comes into play. If you are playing a mass melee faction then they have answers to this (such as Orks swamping with bodies, sending in a Deff Dread who Incubi don't like fighting, etc).

 Ashiraya wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:
Maybe a bad example on my part. I guess I'm just picturing scenarios where two dedicated melee units clash, but one unit is sufficiently killy and with sufficiently high initiative to wipe out the other unit unscathed. Something like 10 incubi versus 10 vanguard vets, for instance. The incubi would presumably be higher initiative and would also be good enough at killing marines to have a decent chance of wiping all the vanguard vets out before they rolled a single attack. Incubi are impressive, but it feels wrong for them to get into melee with an elite dedicated melee unit (like vanguard vets) and not take a single casualty in return.

From what I recall, vanguard vets back then uniquely had charge out of deep strike, so they could choose their targets. They should not be allowing the incubi to charge them lightly.

The incubi are also very very fragile to shooting, even in comparison to the VanVets. This is where I'd genuinely say combined arms comes into play. If you are playing a mass melee faction then they have answers to this (such as Orks swamping with bodies, sending in a Deff Dread who Incubi don't like fighting, etc).

Respectfully, I tend to see responses along these lines when I bring up this particular concern, and I don't feel that you've really addressed my concern directly.

Yes, vanguard vets will generally be able to maneuver around and have some say in which fights they take. Yes, shooting the incubi is always an option. But those are beside my point.

The thing that bugs me is that when two melee-centric units clash, there's a decent chance that one will come out of that clash unscathed because they got to make 100% of their attacks first and were lethal enough to wipe out (or nearly wipe out) the enemy unit. And that's one of the fundamental problems I have with both the modern and oldschool initiative systems. It feels wrong that incubi and vanguard vets should get within stabbing range and one of those units could (without especially good/bad luck) completely demolish the other while taking little or no damage in return.

It just really breaks my immersion when a hardcore melee unit gets into melee with someone, and then proceeds to do absolutely no damage to them.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
And that's one of the fundamental problems I have with both the modern and oldschool initiative systems. It feels wrong that incubi and vanguard vets should get within stabbing range and one of those units could (without especially good/bad luck) completely demolish the other while taking little or no damage in return.

Years ago (more like a decade ago) I played around with something based on the old 5e Repentia faith power.

Any model killed before it swung was placed on its side and got a single attack at init 0.
Tried a few variants - i.e. first round only, no swings for unwieldy weapons or models killed by instant death, no swings for units that were pinned, gone to ground, or falling back when attacked, no swings if the unit was wiped out to a man before init 0, no freebies against single character attacks, etc.

It seemed to dissuade combat more than anything else though when shooting and gunlines were strong.

 Wyldhunt wrote:
The thing that bugs me is that when two melee-centric units clash, there's a decent chance that one will come out of that clash unscathed because they got to make 100% of their attacks first and were lethal enough to wipe out (or nearly wipe out) the enemy unit. And that's one of the fundamental problems I have with both the modern and oldschool initiative systems. It feels wrong that incubi and vanguard vets should get within stabbing range and one of those units could (without especially good/bad luck) completely demolish the other while taking little or no damage in return.

It just really breaks my immersion when a hardcore melee unit gets into melee with someone, and then proceeds to do absolutely no damage to them.

I'd very much argue this is the tradeoff you get in return for the Vanvets being by far tankier and more mobile. Yes, they will get hammered by Incubi (though I'd stress it's pretty unlikely they'd get wiped before they get to swing, because Vanvets have usually brought storm shields to the party).

But otherwise, how would you expect to get around this? If you use Apocalypse style rules where models only get removed at end of turn, you make every such combat into a mutual wipeout (and brutally nerf squishy melee specialists that completely rely on initiative in order to not trade down into most things they encounter). Anything more nuanced would require Kill Team-like nuance beyond what the 40k battle scale is equipped to deal with.

 kirotheavenger wrote:
I'm not a big fan of 2W elites in Heresy. It means that the basic infantry stand absolutely no chance in hell of even holding a candle in melee to them. When your chainsword is hitting on 5s, wounding on 4s, bouncing off a 2+ save, and you still need *two* wounds through to actually do anything noteworthy you rapidly approach the statistical envelope where your basic infantry is doing absolutely bugger all.

Same basic story in shooting as well. HH2.0 had a reputation for everyone spamming super OP lascannons, but that's as much to do with the fact that lascannons were pretty much the only guns effective at killing 2+/2W elites.
Your basic bitch boltguns need not even apply.

2W elites really contributed to the general zeitgeist in 30k now where elites do *all* of the fighting and basic bitch troops just try and hide. *Maybe* they try and have a little scrub-fight with some other basic bitches whilst the actual fighters are distracted...

I'd always thought of the Terminator issue in HH2 as one of pricing more than anything else; I played a lot of TacVet-heavy Deathwing in HH2, and at 18pts/model with 3+ armor the bump to 2W felt a lot fairer than it did on Terminators that stayed at 30pts/model after the wound bump. If the pricing were addressed...I've definitely seen Custodians, 2W Terminators, and the like get dragged down by superior numbers of regular melee infantry, but that's definitely a spot where I need to do more math on the pricing than GW ever does.

The other issue on my mind is that you often end up with an offensive power/defensive power mismatch with veteran units, where you've got something like SM Sternguard loaded with combi-weapons in 7th, or 25pt PAGK in 3rd-4th, or Fire Dragons through most of the history of the game, or things like that, where if you price their offensive output accurately you end up with a unit that's so squishy for its cost compared to anything else in your force that it's only usable as a suicide piece-trade unit that has to be able to make its points back in one turn of shooting or it's not worth using.

 Ashiraya wrote:

 Wyldhunt wrote:
The thing that bugs me is that when two melee-centric units clash, there's a decent chance that one will come out of that clash unscathed because they got to make 100% of their attacks first and were lethal enough to wipe out (or nearly wipe out) the enemy unit. And that's one of the fundamental problems I have with both the modern and oldschool initiative systems. It feels wrong that incubi and vanguard vets should get within stabbing range and one of those units could (without especially good/bad luck) completely demolish the other while taking little or no damage in return.

It just really breaks my immersion when a hardcore melee unit gets into melee with someone, and then proceeds to do absolutely no damage to them.

I'd very much argue this is the tradeoff you get in return for the Vanvets being by far tankier and more mobile. Yes, they will get hammered by Incubi (though I'd stress it's pretty unlikely they'd get wiped before they get to swing, because Vanvets have usually brought storm shields to the party).

But otherwise, how would you expect to get around this? If you use Apocalypse style rules where models only get removed at end of turn, you make every such combat into a mutual wipeout (and brutally nerf squishy melee specialists that completely rely on initiative in order to not trade down into most things they encounter). Anything more nuanced would require Kill Team-like nuance beyond what the 40k battle scale is equipped to deal with.

Yeah. Unfortunately I've yet to come up with a clean way to handle things better short of a compared WS system that just makes glass cannons really hard to hit or something slightly clunky that breaks up each sides attacks into multiple sets of attacks. Neither of which are great solutions. My complaint stands, but I admit I don't have a solution.

 AnomanderRake wrote:

 kirotheavenger wrote:
I'm not a big fan of 2W elites in Heresy. It means that the basic infantry stand absolutely no chance in hell of even holding a candle in melee to them. When your chainsword is hitting on 5s, wounding on 4s, bouncing off a 2+ save, and you still need *two* wounds through to actually do anything noteworthy you rapidly approach the statistical envelope where your basic infantry is doing absolutely bugger all.

Same basic story in shooting as well. HH2.0 had a reputation for everyone spamming super OP lascannons, but that's as much to do with the fact that lascannons were pretty much the only guns effective at killing 2+/2W elites.
Your basic bitch boltguns need not even apply.

2W elites really contributed to the general zeitgeist in 30k now where elites do *all* of the fighting and basic bitch troops just try and hide. *Maybe* they try and have a little scrub-fight with some other basic bitches whilst the actual fighters are distracted...

I'd always thought of the Terminator issue in HH2 as one of pricing more than anything else; I played a lot of TacVet-heavy Deathwing in HH2, and at 18pts/model with 3+ armor the bump to 2W felt a lot fairer than it did on Terminators that stayed at 30pts/model after the wound bump. If the pricing were addressed...I've definitely seen Custodians, 2W Terminators, and the like get dragged down by superior numbers of regular melee infantry, but that's definitely a spot where I need to do more math on the pricing than GW ever does.

The other issue on my mind is that you often end up with an offensive power/defensive power mismatch with veteran units, where you've got something like SM Sternguard loaded with combi-weapons in 7th, or 25pt PAGK in 3rd-4th, or Fire Dragons through most of the history of the game, or things like that, where if you price their offensive output accurately you end up with a unit that's so squishy for its cost compared to anything else in your force that it's only usable as a suicide piece-trade unit that has to be able to make its points back in one turn of shooting or it's not worth using.

I would generally agree on all counts.
The 2W thing however does change the dynamic in a game that can't just be balanced by points. If you increased the cost of Terminators then yes you now open up the possibility of basic troops/weapons fighting them on more equal footing - but you also now massively increase the value of weapons that kill them so people are just spamming lascannons/thunderhammers even harder than they were before. So you don't actually move the needle that much.
You can argue just bump the cost on thunderhammers to match, and that would work. But you can't really do that with lascannons without also changing the dynamic of anti-tank costs. (Then again, specifically in HH2nd tanks were also kinda sad).

You're absolutely right on the firepower-durability ratio
"Oops all special/heavy weapons" squads have a problem with this (And that's including stuff like thunderhammers somewhat in the category as special melee weapons).
Stuff would work better in gameplay terms if weapons were restricted to like 2-4 weapons per squad and the rest as scrubs.

 kirotheavenger wrote:

I would generally agree on all counts.
The 2W thing however does change the dynamic in a game that can't just be balanced by points. If you increased the cost of Terminators then yes you now open up the possibility of basic troops/weapons fighting them on more equal footing - but you also now massively increase the value of weapons that kill them so people are just spamming lascannons/thunderhammers even harder than they were before. So you don't actually move the needle that much.
You can argue just bump the cost on thunderhammers to match, and that would work. But you can't really do that with lascannons without also changing the dynamic of anti-tank costs. (Then again, specifically in HH2nd tanks were also kinda sad).

Thinking out loud...what if the "instant death"/"roll 2 saves" threshold changed from "double T" to "is wounding on 2+"? Bump Veterans to 2W, but broaden the range of weapons that ignore that, so the starcannons and shuriken cannons and assault cannons of the world aren't any less of an issue for them? I don't know if this is a great idea or just swallowing a spider to catch a fly, but on paper I kind of like the idea.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 kirotheavenger wrote:
...You're absolutely right on the firepower-durability ratio
"Oops all special/heavy weapons" squads have a problem with this (And that's including stuff like thunderhammers somewhat in the category as special melee weapons).
Stuff would work better in gameplay terms if weapons were restricted to like 2-4 weapons per squad and the rest as scrubs.

This is actually kind of what "2W Veterans" is trying to achieve. What if you had to buy an extra guy per guy with an upgraded weapon, but you didn't have to work out what a model for "a scrub Terminator" looked like and he didn't get to make attacks? And instead of having to do 6 damage to remove a guy with a powerfist 2 damage would do it?


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Wyldhunt wrote:
...Yeah. Unfortunately I've yet to come up with a clean way to handle things better short of a compared WS system that just makes glass cannons really hard to hit or something slightly clunky that breaks up each sides attacks into multiple sets of attacks. Neither of which are great solutions. My complaint stands, but I admit I don't have a solution.

To my mind this is a lethality issue, more than anything else. If unit A and unit B are elite melee units of comparable price, but they both have a good chance of just completely removing each other if they get to go first, that says to me that damage output is too high.

 AnomanderRake wrote:
To my mind this is a lethality issue, more than anything else. If unit A and unit B are elite melee units of comparable price, but they both have a good chance of just completely removing each other if they get to go first, that says to me that damage output is too high.

Even in the case of glass cannon units like Incubi fighting Genestealers?

 Ashiraya wrote:

 AnomanderRake wrote:
To my mind this is a lethality issue, more than anything else. If unit A and unit B are elite melee units of comparable price, but they both have a good chance of just completely removing each other if they get to go first, that says to me that damage output is too high.

Even in the case of glass cannon units like Incubi fighting Genestealers?

Maybe sorta kinda? Not sure if I've brought this up in this thread already, but something that did kind of work about pre-8th versions of the fight phase was that you didn't necessarily have to actually kill every enemy model with attacks to wrap up combat. You could just do more damage to them than they did to you, and then either sweeping advance or fearless wounds or what have you could help wrap up the combat from there.

Not that I'm advocating for sweeping advance or fearless wounds, mind you. But it meant that units could be less lethal to eachother without every fight turning into a tarpit.

If incubi swing into vanguard vets and then the vets have a few guys left alive who can swing back, then my complaint about one unit wiping out the other unscathed wouldn't really apply.

 Ashiraya wrote:

 AnomanderRake wrote:
To my mind this is a lethality issue, more than anything else. If unit A and unit B are elite melee units of comparable price, but they both have a good chance of just completely removing each other if they get to go first, that says to me that damage output is too high.

Even in the case of glass cannon units like Incubi fighting Genestealers?

Sort of? Even "glass cannon" melee units often have some kind of defensive adaptation (3+ armor on Incubi, T4 on Genestealers, Invuls on Harlequins...) that ought to make them a little more resistant to just getting wiped than their army's regular infantry. I know the prevalence of high-volume power weapons makes the armor save not that valuable, and I am still working on tweaks to what gets what for AP, but even in the case of glass cannon units I'd prefer tweaking durability to a point where you're not expecting to immediately die if a unit with the same cost gets to hit first.

Thinking about Gets Hot/Overload/Hazardous/whatever weapons quite a lot recently. I suspect the basic game feel issue of 2+ armor and all-or-nothing AP is familiar to all of us, and there are a number of tweaks GW and other systems have done over the years to poke and prod at it.

I suspect the first thing you though of when I started this post was save mod AP. I don't mind save mod AP in the abstract, but in 8e-10e there was so much AP that things very rarely rolled their armor save since it was so easy to push them back to their 4++/5++ Inv. AoS 1e-2e and Old World smooshed the AP down a lot, where anything spammable was never really better than -1 and -2/-3 were extremely rare and fancy, but there you end up smooshing a lot of stat granularity.

Without moving to save mods HH2/3's use of "breaching" makes the impact of anti-2+ weapons less dramatic, so they're not as expensive and easier/less swingy to take in your list.

And the third major approach is just to back off on using 2+ armor at all. AoS 1e/2e didn't really have anything with base 2+, Old World knocked out the +1 save for horses so shock cavalry that wasn't in the maximally expensive tier was stuck with a 3+. Back in 3e/4e 2+ armor was very, very expensive, and almost unavailable to models that moved more than 6" a turn.

Which brings us back to Gets Hot. I know there are lore reasons for it, but mechanically its main function is to offer a downside to a specific class of big, powerful weapons that are too good against too many targets. There are two problems with this: a) it'd probably be easier just to back off on making your weapon good against too many targets, and b) the implementation of Gets Hot is often hostile to fast-rolling, since I need to know which specific mini rolled the 1. When we were talking single plasma guns in Tactical squads in 4e it wasn't terrible, but by the time we get to the modern Hellblaster squad it's very obnoxious.

My first instinct is to just drop Gets Hot from the design space. I don't know if the decision of whether to fire the Gets Hot weapon or not is interesting; pre-8e I've never seen anyone ever choose not to fire the plasma gun because of the risk of exploding, and post-8e it's just a really basic set of stat gates where if the target has more T/W than some threshold you fire the bigger stat mode, but presenting it as a decision is enough to make sit down and think they should be doing some math at the table, which ends up slowing the game down.

How about treating overcharged profiles similarly to 4th edition Blade Storm on Dire Avengers?

That is, you can opt to shoot a more powerful (overcharged) version of a weapon's profile, but doing so means you can't fire the weapon at all on the following turn as the weapon has to vent.

So models are no longer blowing themselves up with dangerous plasma weapons. Instead, they're taking a moment to vent excess heat, or recharge the weapon capacitor or whatever. The psyker is taking a moment to catch his breath. The railgun is taking a moment to build up charge. Etc.

You get the interesting decision of spiking your offense on one turn for no offense (with that weapon) on the next turn. The cool thing when Dire Avengers used to do this was that it actually resulted in less overall offense over the course of two turns, but you could potentially finish off that unit that you needed dead immediately and significantly change the game state as a result. It was an interesting decision that factored in the positioning of units, where you thought units would move on the following turn, etc. instead of just being a mathematical no-brainer.

This does introduce a small amount of bookkeeping, but no more than we had on dire avengers back in 4th/5th edition. Especially if you write the rule such that units must overcharge either all or none of their overchargable weapons. (So that you don't have to bookkeep individual plasma weapons within the unit.)

One solution to fast rolling overcharged plasma is to

1. Only cause a single Wound loss per die.
2. Casualties have to be taken from models in the squad that used an overcharged weapon first and are capped at the amount of (models that used overcharged * wounds).

Reads more complicated than it is: "Roll fast and pick up plasma gunners only."

When it comes to AP I've been liking the idea of a system where if AP=Sv then there's a -1 on the save, if AP is better then the save is bypassed.
When applying this to current AP values, I think most APs should be improved by 1. IE your typical AP3 powersword becomes AP2 - it's still flatout ignoring powerarmour but is now actually increasing your performance vs terminator armour (it doesn't become a fancy chainsword). Similarly an autocannon is now giving you a slightly improved chance of punching through powerarmour, but isn't much more use against terminator armour.

Breaching from HH works too. But it feels like quite a cludge. And also scales weirdly as it often means weapons that gain breaching skip over the 'effective vs powerarmour' and jump straight into 'just as effective vs terminator armour' which can feel a bit weird.

On Gets Hot I quite like the HH3 approach to it, IE each 1 just targets the squad, allocated to someone that fired the weapon. Means you can fast roll, and it means that there's a difference between weak Gets Hot and very deadly Gets Hot (and how tough the guys are that carry them).
Slight caveat to that is I think some vehicles should have some additional protection vs their Gets Hot. Vehicles like a Cerberus end up pretty much killing themselves very easily due to having Gets Hot on a powerful AT weapon, it's a bit much.

I certainly think Gets Hot had a useful place in the game and it certainly Brings Joy to warrant being kept. The speedrolling issue is a trivial fix and you just need to hit the right lethality-danger ratio to make it feel mechanically interesting.

 AnomanderRake wrote:
b) the implementation of Gets Hot is often hostile to fast-rolling, since I need to know which specific mini rolled the 1.

A friend of mine back in 5th particularly liked their plasma and the speed rolling process was:
1) Different colour (or split) dice for squad plasma weapons and characters with plasma weapons.
2) Plasma cannons got their own set of rolls (one per gun) before any other shooting.
3) Any ones that came up would trigger saves. Any wounds would only be taken from the character/squad/cannons that rolled them.

Beyond that we ignored specific allocation - controlling player picked who from a given group took the failed saves until they ran out of suitable models.

 kirotheavenger wrote:
When it comes to AP I've been liking the idea of a system where if AP=Sv then there's a -1 on the save, if AP is better then the save is bypassed.
When applying this to current AP values, I think most APs should be improved by 1. IE your typical AP3 powersword becomes AP2 - it's still flatout ignoring powerarmour but is now actually increasing your performance vs terminator armour (it doesn't become a fancy chainsword). Similarly an autocannon is now giving you a slightly improved chance of punching through powerarmour, but isn't much more use against terminator armour.

Breaching from HH works too. But it feels like quite a cludge. And also scales weirdly as it often means weapons that gain breaching skip over the 'effective vs powerarmour' and jump straight into 'just as effective vs terminator armour' which can feel a bit weird...

It's certainly an interesting idea. Have you tried it on the table at all? It'd be interesting to see how much it slows down play.

I wonder if it'd be interesting to hybridize this with Old World's Armour Bane rule, where the 6 to wound improves your AP by some amount instead of just setting it to "ignores all armor". Or use Breaching where the to-wound value can bump around, but it only improves your AP by 1.

I should probably go back and start taking notes on AP in 1e/2e, get another data point for the distribution of AP in 40k.

Thinking about army-specific issues.

-SM/CSM I think I have mostly figured out. The questions of AP as relates to Terminators and whether the org chart should support all-Terminator forces remain, but if the system is going to be able to support Custodes as an army the all-Terminator force is less extreme of a skew than that, so it should be doable. Most of the Primaris range is just rolling back in as "alternate sculpt of classic range", but the grav-tanks are remaining skimmers.

-Guard: Most of what happens here has to do with weapon statlines that affect a bunch of other armies. Platoons/combined squads are a question; I don't know if the exactly-10-models structure of regular line infantry makes a lot of sense given the pricepoints involved? They're so cheap that back when you had the fixed middlehammer org chart one Troops choice was 3-6 squads so that you had enough space to do a really big swarm list within the army book.

The extra consideration for Guard is that I'd like to be able to shove GSC and Chaos Cults/Traitor Guard into the same book as list variants, so I've been thinking more about their "doctrine"/sub-faction system than a lot of the others. My current theory is that you pick a "regimental organization" (line, light, armored, airborne, or siege) and an "origin" (Progenium, bastion world, feral world, mutant regiment, insurgents), and use those tags to construct stat differences and unit variations.

-Sisters: I think I have the force relatively figured out, at least on paper. "Acts of Faith" get rolled into the same basic game-mechanical infrastructure that psykers and cybertheurgy live under, some kind of martyrdom bonus where you wiping a unit gives them plusses. Main issue with them is that their physical kits aren't very modular, so whatever stats and options I give them are going to be under-tested if they're not in the kit.

-Custodes: I had a game with their new HH3 rules the other day that I liked quite a bit; the regular units still wreck regular enemies, but sticking their regular infantry into an enemy elite melee unit isn't necessarily going to end well for them. I've been pondering dropping their line infantry/jetbikes to 3+ armor and keeping 2+ on the Terminators; in theory if I'm giving WS/BS5 on regular units and 2W veterans out to more people I'm making them less distinctive, sure, but like with SM I don't think a unit needs a higher stat in every spot on the statline all the time to be "better".

-Other Agents: The basic question here is what the Inquisition does that couldn't be represented by a Guard Stormtroopers force with SM allies, which is going to take some thought. Assassins are a unit I'm not sure belongs in a full-size game; they're great models, they're a great element of the lore, but they ought to be doing some kind of stealth op skirmish scenario, not piece-trading on a battlefield for an infantry squad.

-Mechanicum: This is mostly a matter of integrating the 40k lineup with the HH lineup. There's a secondary question here of how to treat some of the 40k units; the fact that GW wants, e.g., Sydonian Dragoons to be 65ppm melee units and fielded in squads of 1-3 and wants to charge $65/model for them seems to be largely an experiment in price-gouging. Which means that if I don't want to participate in the price-gouging a lot of the 40k AdMech units need pretty major stat buffs to bring their pricepoint up to something where the cost/points ratio is a little more sane.

-Daemons: I'm definitely using the HH Ruinstorm rules as a starting point, 40k Daemons are really rigid/inflexible/standardized for something that calls itself Chaos. Exact implementation of "instability", HH-style portals vs. just deepstriking, and a lot of other details remain to be seen.

-Eldar: I don't have a lot of futzing around to do with army organization, but they're loaded with spots to shove stats around. Army org wise the main thing I'm tossing around is whether there should be a Craftworld Venom. There are plenty of arguments for, and arguments against, but the fact that the Corsairs are definitely getting their Venom back and the fact that there's never been an assault transport for Howling Banshees are definitely making me lean "yes".

-Dark Eldar: Not a lot of ideas here for things that need to be fixed. Within the framework of stuff I've already written down using HH2-3-style Reactions, and the core rules tweaks to Jink, line of sight, and light vehicle durability, are already pretty significant improvements to their game plan over how they performed in middlehammer.

-Tau: Markerlights are an issue; I don't like clamping their BS to lower values because they've got a mechanic that gives them +BS, and I don't like the fact that the faction's identity is "guns have higher stats than yours". Other things on my list of stuff to address are what drones are (the wound allocation shoot order puzzle was awful, but I'd almost prefer just deleting them from the roster to having to move six extra non-model markers around with Crisis teams to be technically WYSIWYG), whether Crisis teams get gun-fu melee profiles so the army isn't nailed to the leafblower game plan, and how big XV-9 Hazard suits are really.

I'm more settled on directions for Necrons (standardize res mechanics and expand Cryptek functions), Orks (what if we didn't keep stacking extra numerical steps on to account for the fact that we've nailed them to BS2, and just didn't nail them to BS2?), and Tyranids (chassis size + biomorphs), but I don't have a great sense of the Votann faction identity right now and need to spend more time reading about how they function.

Late to the party! We veered off somewhere in 5th Ed. & started to make our own hybridized rules, incorporationg elements of other editions if they seemed worthwile.

We still use Initiative, and use it also to determine movement rates: Initiative + Armor Save, in inches. We also allow any bonus attacks for charging to 'strike first'. That way nobz with klawz (& sergeants w/ powerfists) get at least one swing off the bat with their cumbersome weapon.

We don't have any issue with the binary nature of saves, but any kind of cover does make it a -1 penalty to hit a target.

Spent some time this month reading 2e stats and pondering the nature of save-mod AP. 2e's AP was more aggressive than any other version of Warhammer; the existence of save-on-2d6 as a mechanic for things like Terminators and squat exosuits sort of demanded it. I don't think any of its numbers or lessons are particularly transferrable to later versions of the game where all saves are taken on 1d6.

That said I do think save-mod AP is a thing I'm interested in exploring; I think smoothing the save-performance bump from 3+ to 2+ and the AP performance bump from AP3 to AP2 is a good idea, and I think middlehammer did write itself into a corner where everything needed an Invulnerable save to be able to exist on the table. Save mod AP also makes "better AP on a 6 to wound" a more streamlined and easier to use mechanic.

I'm expecting to use the Index 8th approximation (5-old AP = new AP) as a starting point, but since I'm planning to keep "cover saves" rather than making them a bonus to armor saves what I end up with may be a little more toned down than that. I'm hoping to avoid too many spammable small-arms with AP in the game; while on paper making bolt rifles -1 AP was cute I feel like giving a whole army AP on everything ended up devaluing 3+ armor across the board in 8th.

Did a couple of test games yesterday with save-mod AP to see what would happen, and I'm more skeptical of...a lot of my work so far than I was. Trying to apply the weaker save-mod AP framework of early Sigmar/Old World was interesting on paper, but I hadn't considered that there's just a lot less armor in those games, or the fact that it just makes Invuls not really matter since so few attacks can actually knock a 2+/3+-armor unit back to the Invul. Moving the double-damage threshold to "wounds on 2+" was interesting when it let lascannons do double damage to walkers/monsters, but combining that with 2W Veterans and save mods just left Terminators feeling even flimsier for their cost than they were in middlehammer.

I don't know if I'm going to re-price a bunch of stuff and try again, or back off from 2W Veterans/save mod AP. I'm worried that I'm going to write myself into a corner with save-mod AP where the only real way out is to wander into 8e with 2W regular Marines and a damage stat. Most of the other changes we were trying this week (front/rear armor faces only, giving weapons a moving/stationary rate of fire and range in place of "types", HH2 reactions) I liked, fortunately.

 AnomanderRake wrote:

Not to toot my own horn, (too much) but I would recommend you check out the rules for overpower I have in pepsihammer, it might be exactly what you are after.
>if S - T >= 3 , cause 2 wounds and -1 rend
It smooths over some nice edge cases and nicely blends using classic AP with rend.

One of the things to understand about dice mods is their effect is nonlinear. A reduction in a poor armour save is much less significant than a reduction in a good armour save.

Take a 5+ save. Ap5 will reduce this to nothing. This equates to a 50% increase in casualties caused (failing 6/6 saves vs 4/6 saves). In this case AP-2 will do the same thing. But take those same two weapons and apply them to a 3+ save. Ap5 does nothing, but AP-2 vs a 3+ save actually doubles the casualties, failing 4/6 saves vs 2/6).

One of the things about a rend vs AP system is that it is just sometimes what one offers just isn’t what you actually want for all situations. If you replace ap5 with AP-2 universally space marines are never going to be making their 3+ saves.

A 2+ save model being hit by AP-1 is equivalent to a 4+ save unit being hit by ap4, both cause twice as many casualties to be made. Now sometimes you might want this, but sometimes you just want plain old AP4; a machine gun type weapons like a heavy bolter should decimate medium armour while simultaneously ping off power armour.

I think something to look at is just how the proliferation of ap3 and ap2 changed over the editions of midhammer. In 4th ed Ap3 was rare, it was basically just missile launchers. Dark reapers were 35 points! Tau’s only ap3 was the hammerhead mounted ion cannon. And in each edition rapid fire got stronger and stronger (looking at you plasma guns). Come 7th Ed however you had stuff like grav cents throwing 4 ap2 shots a price, and every army could spam an ap2 pie plate. I think you’d be better off looking at the root of the problem rather than trying to resolve it through mechanics that affect other things that already work well.

 pepsi wrote:
...I think something to look at is just how the proliferation of ap3 and ap2 changed over the editions of midhammer. In 4th ed Ap3 was rare, it was basically just missile launchers. Dark reapers were 35 points! Tau’s only ap3 was the hammerhead mounted ion cannon. And in each edition rapid fire got stronger and stronger (looking at you plasma guns). Come 7th Ed however you had stuff like grav cents throwing 4 ap2 shots a price, and every army could spam an ap2 pie plate. I think you’d be better off looking at the root of the problem rather than trying to resolve it through mechanics that affect other things that already work well.

The basic problem of stat creep in middlehammer is down to size creep/speed creep. If you look at your 4e Daemon Prince floating around with his 3+/5++, T5/4W, 18" melee threat range, and no guns bigger than one single-target S8 Bolt of Change, and compare them to your 7e Riptides and Dreadknights the amount of firepower you need to drop a monster quickly and the penalties for not dropping a monster quickly have both blown up dramatically. The 3e/4e stat framework works great if you're sticking to the model size/game sizes of 3e/4e, but there's a lot of stuff in the game now that doesn't slot into that framework easily.

That said, the question of whether I'd be better off just constructing a balance patch/back-port datasheets for 4e isn't a bad one.