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Hello Dakka, in the Hope's of running a very narritive driven campaign I've been tasked with creating rules to help represent fluff. If any of you have an idea to help me with that I'd love to hear it.

So I honestly dislike how Voidshields work in 8th, I liked how they worked in 7th so I tried to match it up.

Voidshield rule



I've been debating about making the Shield layer T9. My original stat line had it at T7 with W5. But I feel like it didnt match the description of a voidshield. Being T9 makes it harder for St8 to strip the shield. But with it only having W2 , once you fail a save it's more then likely that the layer will collapse.

I feel that using a Layered system is accurate to fluff them just using a constant inv save.

I like the idea, but in 7th each void shield layer was basically an extra AV 12 hull point so for 8th I would think each layer should be a single T 7-8 wound. Maybe give them a special rule that reduces damage to 1 per hit then a single melta gun doesn't knock out 6 layers of void shields in one shot.

These rules seem like they could work just fine, but it kind of depends on what exactly your goal is. You mentioned superheavies, so I assume you're picturing these being used as part of a large-scale game and specifically mounted on a model as a sort of "personal shield". In which case, one player should have plenty of firepower with which to disable a couple of T9 wounds.

On the other hand, a void shield generator fortification at, let's say, 1500 points will only be wounded a third of the time by anything strength 5 through 8. So depending on pricing, it might theoretically be able to tank significantly more points worth of heavy firepower than it costs. At which point you risk running into the 7th edition voidshield problem of voidshields basically becoming mandatory to help key units survive alpha striking dakka.

On the other other hand, this is an edition where one out of six lasgun hits will turn into a wound. So the optimal strategy, depending on positioning and so forth, would be to plink away at void shields with any small or medium arms that won't be likely to do much to the real targets anyway and see if you get lucky with a couple of shots. So in an army with a good mix of small and heavy weaponry, your void shield is going to get taken down by bolter and lasgun fire a surprising amount of the time.

Your shield rules are pleasingly visceral, but they do introduce some fluff/crunch disparity.

Wyldhunt wrote:
These rules seem like they could work just fine, but it kind of depends on what exactly your goal is. You mentioned superheavies, so I assume you're picturing these being used as part of a large-scale game and specifically mounted on a model as a sort of "personal shield". In which case, one player should have plenty of firepower with which to disable a couple of T9 wounds.

On the other hand, a void shield generator fortification at, let's say, 1500 points will only be wounded a third of the time by anything strength 5 through 8. So depending on pricing, it might theoretically be able to tank significantly more points worth of heavy firepower than it costs. At which point you risk running into the 7th edition voidshield problem of voidshields basically becoming mandatory to help key units survive alpha striking dakka.

On the other other hand, this is an edition where one out of six lasgun hits will turn into a wound. So the optimal strategy, depending on positioning and so forth, would be to plink away at void shields with any small or medium arms that won't be likely to do much to the real targets anyway and see if you get lucky with a couple of shots. So in an army with a good mix of small and heavy weaponry, your void shield is going to get taken down by bolter and lasgun fire a surprising amount of the time.

Your shield rules are pleasingly visceral, but they do introduce some fluff/crunch disparity.

The voidshield generator fortification actually came up in the campaign discussion I had with my group. We concluded that the generator is only producing 1 layer. And that because the campaign will be played in a "Total War" fashion, building fortifications will require owning the territory for more then a turn or two.

I was asked to make an alternate voidshield rule that will represent the shields on TITANS and some rare superheavys like the stormbird or mastodon. But I appreciate the feed back. I'll look into seeing how to adjust the layer T value, maybe change it based on the vehical using it