BOOM!
With a mighty crash the Warlord Titan toppled to the ground crushing tanks, buildings and infantry like ants below a mighty foot. The God-Machine had served the Imperium across countless battlefields and triumphed over numberless foes was slain.
As the cyclone of dust and debris settled two hulking figures appeared they high-fived each other.
"Dude that was awesome! Man I never saw someone roll that many 6s, bang-bang-bang, structure points gone."
"Yeah who have figured a marine sergeant with a powerfist could take down a titan huh? But our victory was not without a cost, look at our squad Rhino, it lost a stormbolter!
Introduction and General Thoughts
Apocalypse games can be fun, but at times the mix of skirmish rules and mass combat rules really hurts them. 2 things that struck me are how the level of detail for normal vehicles is too granular, but Superheavies were much too vulnerable.
For the normal vehicles you can easily have a dozen or more per player and after a turn or two tracking stuns, immobilized, weapons destroyed is just a pain.
For superheavies you lose a structure point 1/3 of the time and your opponent gets to roll again 1/6 of the time. I'm pretty sure that Titans are not supposed to go down to a dread or a termi assaulting its ankles.
So here's my 2 proposals. Drastically simplify damage for normal vehicles while increase the granularity for the Superheavies.
Apocalypse Vehicle Damage
Simplified Damage Table for normal vehicles
1-3 Stunned, may not move or shoot (including embarked models)
4-6 Destroyed (remove vehicle, models within take a S4 hit)
Normal modifiers apply.
While it seems to penalize normal vehicles this simplifies things greatly and really only increases the chance of destruction by 1/6. Plus squadrons would ignore Stunned as normal.
And frankly in an Apocalypse battle Rhinos and Lemans should be dying by the fist full anyway. Just as no one cares if Pvt Jones gets a leg wound in a normal game, no one has time to care if a Wave Serpent lost its Twin Linked Shuriken Catapults! We have more important things going on!
In fact it may be wise to ignore the 6th edition hull point rules and just go back to the 'Glancing = -1 to roll' rule of 5th edition.
Apocalypse Superheavy Vehicle Damage
For all penetrating hits roll 2d6 with the normal modifiers for AP1, etc.
If a result is not applicable move up to the next result
All hits remove 1 hull point, 1 structure point=3 hull points
Normal modifiers apply.
Superheavy Damage Table
2 One weapon (defender's choice) shaken, may not fire next turn
3 One weapon (attacker's choice) shaken, may not fire next turn
4 Stunned, may not move, must roll 4+ to fire any primary weapons next turn (may fire secondary weapons, roll for each weapon)
5 Stunned, may not move, must roll 4+ to fire any weapons next turn (roll for each weapon)
6 d6 Secondary weapons destroyed (no further effect once all secondary weapons are destroyed, but if no secondary weapons when hit move to next result)
7 Primary weapon destroyed
8 Drive damaged, may only move at half speed (immobilized if this is rolled again)
9 Lose a structure point
10 Lose a structure point and armor damaged (-1 AV to that facing for the rest of the game)
11 Lose a structure point and Fire (+1 to damage results for the rest of the game, embarked models take S3 hit)
12 Lose a structure point and roll again (if you roll a second 12 you may continue to roll)
One problem was where to put the loss of a structure point. On a d6 you have a 33% chance, but on 2d6 it's either a 27% chance (rolling a 9) or a 42% chance (rolling 8). So I went with the 27% chance but added additional bad stuff to most of the rolls.
So any comments?
I originally pitched this in a thread, which you can see here:
http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/list/381172.page#3035752