The GREAT 40k thread

Rules change seems decent, although they need to fix a continuity issue between the article and update (aircraft models vs units)

that said seeing admech, druhkari and orks getting nerfed is a huge plus. competitive was getting really stale and this should help a fair bit to make other armies more viable

 

I've just noticed that free rules update sheet, it's about time GW finally recognise the importance of balance. Let's hope they get round to doing this with AoS too.

Indeed this is pretty much what the General's Handbook and the terribly-named 'Chapter Approved' were supposed to do but just ended up being more unnecessary paperwork to have to spend money on.

 

This was kind of spurred on by the bump in armour save for the Leman Russ from 3+ to 2+ in the recent update, but also a bit of an opinion I've had regarding vehicles in general since the start of 8th Edition. Suffice to say I'm a pretty big fan of how they were treated in 7th though, which is the basis for my idea here.

In my opinion, vehicles have kind of fallen by the wayside since being shunted to the universal datasheet template, even after a pretty hefty update before the start of 9th that restored some of their capabilities as viable units. In conjunction with a wounding system that enables any weapon to wound any target on a 6 at bare minimum, vehicles lost a lot of the durability they were known for (GW, in their infinite wisdom as of 8th Edition, decided to cap toughness values to a 1-10 scale while allowing the strength of certain weapons to reach upwards of Strength 16). This has largely resulted in many tanks, some of which once being impervious to all but high-strength dedicated anti-tank weapons (in both lore and older editions), now liable to being plinked to death by mid-strength multishot D2 weapons of middling AP like the humble heavy bolter.

A quintessential example of this would be the Land Rider, which due to how the Armour Value system worked back in 7th and earlier could only be taken down conventionally by weapons of at least Strength 8, barring any special rules. Since 8th Edition, Land Raiders have been assigned Toughness 8, 16 wounds, and a 2+ armour save. This profile certainly looks impressive on paper (and definitely better than most other tanks available in the game), but once the new wounding system is applied, Toughness 8 is currently much more susceptible to being wounded by weapons of at least Strength 5 (I'm discounting weaker weapons here, since most can't exceed a 1/18 chance of successfully inflicting damage to such a target per attack. For comparison, a heavy bolter has a 1/9 chance per attack of inflicting damage against this profile).

To this end, I decided to dive a little into the abstract of what the Toughness characteristic is supposed to represent in the current edition with respect to vehicles, how it compares to the AV system in previous editions, and attempt to come up with a satisfactory compromise between them that myself and others may find useful as a house rule.

As a general abstract for game purposes, Toughness is a measure of a unit's ability to resist damage in some way, in contrast to Wounds taking damage and Armour Saves preventing damage. This may be the short and sweet of it, but how a unit arrives at that value in-game depends entirely on its nature. Biological units derive their Toughness from their body structure, robotic units derive theirs additionally from the materials used in their construction, and daemons derive theirs from Warp shenanigans. Vehicles however are hollow metal boxes for the most part, meaning that even if a shot were to penetrate the hull, there's no real guarantee that it will actually cause sufficient damage within to cripple the vehicle apart from directly hitting a vital internal system (crew members included) or being the delivery mechanism for something else. As such, it can be reasoned that a Toughness characteristic of a vehicle in 40k is or ought to be based on the abstract of this difficulty.

In many ways, this was already implemented in the old AV system, whereby success in penetrating a vehicle's hull (and thus being able to cause damage) meant overcoming a vehicle's front, side or rear Armour Value (each of which typically ranging between 10 and 14) in what can be considered the equivalent of a wound roll. Back then, the penetration roll typically consisted of rolling a d6, adding the weapon's strength to the result, and comparing it to the Armour Value being tested against. A result equal to the AV (a glancing hit) was able to do a point of structural damage, while a result greater than the AV (a penetrating hit) was potentially catastrophic for the target in question in addition to that structural point of damage. Coming back to the Land Raider example from earlier, a conventional Strength 8 weapon could only inflict glancing hits on the roll of a 6 (incidentally, Land Raiders had AV 14 in all directions) before special rules like Armourbane (additional 1d6 for penetration), Melta (Armourbane at half range), Rending (additional d3 on an initial roll of a 6), or Haywire (additional 4+ chance to penetrate).

Understanding how weapons interact with vehicles here is important to keep in mind moving forward, since we can't really have a discussion about changing the former without discussing the impacts it will have on the latter and vice versa. This will be a topic we'll be returning to as a result.

Short of simply deciding to play 7th Edition or Horus Heresy, my solution for the matter of vehicular Toughness is a bit of a mathematical one. From how the current wounding system works and how the old AV system used to work, we can presume the following:

1. The minimum Strength capable of glancing a given AV must be equal to 6 less than that AV;
2. Any Strength value less than the minimum Strength ought to be less than half of the vehicle's projected Toughness value; and
3. Accounting for an unmodified Armour Save, the minimum Strength ought to be able to wound the vehicle on a 5+ for comparable probability of damaging it.

AV 10 (Min S 4) -> ~T 7
AV 11 (Min S 5) -> ~T 9
AV 12 (Min S 6) -> ~T 11
AV 13 (Min S 7) -> ~T 13
AV 14 (Min S 8) -> ~T 15

As demonstrated, this roughly translates into a metric where every increase in AV starting at 10 corresponds with two increases in Toughness starting at 7.

With that said, unlike the Land Raider, most vehicles in 7th Edition do not have the same AV all around. For instance, Leman Russ tanks in 7th have a 14F/13S/10R AV profile instead, while the Baneblade has a 14F/13S/12R profile. Again, the solution is pretty mathematical. I have opted to use the overall average (counting the side profile twice for an even division of 4) multiplied by 2, followed by subtracting 13 from the result and rounding down to the nearest whole number:

Toughness = (Average AV x 2) - 13

This would give the Land Raider T15, Leman Russ tanks T12, and the Baneblade T13. Rinse and repeat for the nearly 200 in-game vehicles, be it by hand or Excel spreadsheet, substituting the underlined variable names for cell references as needed:

=ROUNDDOWN(2*((FRONT+SIDE*2+REAR)/4)-IF(OPENTOP="Yes",13.5,13))

OPENTOP in this case is a reference to the old Open-Topped special rule, which in this instance represents the slightly more exposed nature of an open-topped vehicle's vital systems. Long story short, if a vehicle's operators are usually exposed and not wearing power armour, it's an open-topped vehicle.

As it so happens, this conveniently lines up with many light vehicles - IG Sentinels especially - being pretty faithfully depicted in-game as is with little to no need to adjust their Toughness characteristic.

Of course, since there's been many vehicles that have come out since 8th Edition and thus don't have AV profiles from earlier editions (i.e. every Primaris vehicle), the best I can recommend is to look at the trends involving other vehicles with similar characteristics and use your best judgment when applying changes.

As stated previously, we can't discuss changes to vehicles without addressing the things most affected by those changes. In this case, anti-armour weaponry. I've mentioned it elsewhere, but I don't fully agree with GW's penchant for bonus damage being the means by which such weapons "defeat armour" over the past two editions. What is needed however is an improved ability to wound such high-Toughness targets with an anti-armour weapon, and the easiest way to do that in 9th at the moment (at least, without resorting to Mortal Wound spam) is to simply grant a +1 to wound units with the VEHICLE keyword. If you so wanted to, you could apply that to any and all weapons that used to have the special rules mentioned earlier for the benefit of penetrating armour.

Admittedly, I've yet to play test such a substantial house ruling, but I can see it providing a different approach to how vehicles are addressed as both threat and asset in a current edition army. Insofar as I'm concerned, 9th Ed really only does infantry and light vehicles any justice.

 

Finished my contemptor dreadnought!



Revered Brother Jorodin of the Inheritors Chapter.



His banner and the model in general was both fun to assemble and paint, just took a while compared to a regular marine!



Ready to go slay some more xenos!

 

Got my High Marshal Helbrecht in the mail today!



Long time in coming, happy this model got an update! The original is still one of my most favorite painting projects.

Will be converting this new model into a Watchmaster for my Deathwatch army. In the meantime some of his leftover bits have been repurposed for a heavy intercessor.

 

The grenade launcher is a bit comical on this. Not as much as it would be on a lasgun (I remember making one such attempt back in 3rd Edition with just the barrel, before I realized that a short length of plastic tubing did the trick just as well), but it still looks like an awfully unbalanced firearm even for a Primaris Astartes.

 

Funny that you mention it I was thinking the same thing today while I was painting up two other marines, and went back and tweaked his weapon a bit.



The weapon is still comically oversized towards the front, but I was really unhappy how far the grenade launcher went in front of the main gun above it. I shortened the grenade launcher bit to be in line with the main gun nozzle.

Still outrageous though... only thing that might fix it is moving the first gun nozzle up on the weapon itself and making the whole thing look like the regular intercessor grenade launcher, but that would be too much work!

 

Yeah, trying to make detailed underslung grenade launchers on most Imperial firearms can be a bit of a pain. Like I said earlier, my last attempt at doing so involved plastic tubing just small enough in diameter to fit into the user's foregrip:

 

That looks really good considering how simple it is, very much in size to a real world underslung M203 or 320 grenade launcher.

Also looks like you made those ages ago! Ever paint up a full Imperial Guard or other 40K army?

 

Yeah, the models were made over a decade ago. I might be able to dig up some of them still, though it also wouldn't surprise me if more than a few of them wound up in the trash since.

I still haven't built up or painted an entire IG army, though I do have a HH/40k Salamanders army painted up to tabletop standard. I'm currently working on their Primarch, actually, as he's effectively the second-last model I need to round out my collection of close to 5,000 points worth of Salamanders for Horus Heresy (the last is a Spartan for him and his Firedrake bodyguard to cruise around in).

I still have plans for a mechanized Guard army though. I've mentioned elsewhere that I intend for them to be a high-tech island hopping force with a lot of grav-equivalent vehicles to the IG arsenal, along with "bullgryns" that are actually militarized submersible exosuits (Centurion kits work well for this).

 

Finished him!

Brother Anslem of the Black Templars

 

Here is all five heavy intercessors, got two more aggressors to purchase and paint before my Indomitor kill team is done.

Spoiler

Blood Angels, Black Templars, Sons of Medusa, the Koi, and the Yellowjackets

 

Looks great!