I have been running the Final Sanction scenario for my characters, upgraded to use the full rules. Since the group consists of 5 Space Marines and a female Inquisitor/Psyker. I have been boosting the magnitude of all the rebel hordes by 10. Here is what keeps happening.

The characters find themselves faced with a Magnitude 50 horde who just boiled around the corner 30 meters away. Initiatives are rolled and due to the Marines better overall initiative it is not uncommon for the entire party to beat the horde on initiative and attack first.

The Devastator opens up with his Heavy Bolter, due to the size modifier, short range and full-auto modifiers he ends up with a 115% chance to hit. He rolls a 24 hitting with all 10 shots and scoring 21 Magnitude damage (10 doubled, plus 1 for explosive). The Apothecary, Tactical Marine and Tech Marine all open up with their Boltguns. Once again due to range they all have chances well over 100% to hit and all do maximum damage scoring 15 more Magnitude damage (4 hits, plus 1 for explosive, each). The Inquisitor Psyker uses her Fire Storm power (from Dark Heresy). She uses it fettered since her Psy Rating is great enough she can easily manifest the power. Using the guidelines from Deathwatch we find that this will do Psy Rating used +1d10 magnitude damage to a horde. She does 11 magnitude damage (3 for half her Psy Rating plus a roll of 8 on a d10). Finally the Assault Marine uses his pistol to score 2 hits doing 3 magnitude (2 hits, plus 1 for explosive). The horde is completely eliminated and never got a chance to fight back.

This can be discouraging for the Assault Marine because most hordes are either dead or fleeing in abject terror before he can even manage to close into melee combat.

On the occasions when the Marines do not eliminate the horde, or it makes its morale roll to stick around, it is a pitiful remant which poses no real threat and is quickly finished off on the following round.

Is this the sort of experience the rest of you are having with the game?

I've generally found multiple hordes is the way to go, instead of larger hordes. Two mag 40 hordes is more to fight than a single mag 50, because that mag 50 horde will be gone after it drops down to mag 13 or so (so the assault marine wouldn't even get to attack after the first 4 marines attack.). They'll learn they can either eliminate an entire horde, or be forced to split their fire or suffer alot of high damage attacks.

Also I don't use the RAW cover rules. Instead I change the horde's size modifier intuitively based on the magnitude of the horde left and modified by how much of the horde is visible vs in full cover. If a rebels horde of Mag 50 gives +30 to hit in the open, it might only give +20 to hit if distributed across a street facade or +10 to hit (or only +0) if heavily entrenched. Furthermore if the horde is out in the open and the Devastator does 21 mag damage, the next attack might give only +10 to hit because the mowed down bodies give some kind of cover to those behind and the overall size of the horde just has nearly halved.

Alex

very good suggestions Alex with an ak-73

Yeah, that's pretty much my experience. You need to provide at least 2-3 targets to let at least one attack. Then you have the issue of dealing with hordes under 30 Mag having pretty much 0 chance of doing any real damage to the marines (2d10+3 pen 0 autoguns often fail to beat their soak).

The problem is hordes have a very poor balancing point. They either do a ton of damage (5 x 3d10+3 dmg or full auto heavy stubber fire) or are completely ineffectual (unable to hit, breaking before attacking, etc.). Tyranid and other Fearless hordes keep them from immediately breaking, but I've not really found a good balance where they can be dangerous without possibly killing a marine in a round. If the marines are lucky, or even just average, they will break a horde or two per round. If they are unlucky, they will see massive return fire.

Your Assault marine is also correct that he gets the short end of the stick by far. He has to 'waste' a round charging with a single attack, then he does significantly less damage to hordes with far fewer bonuses (in the average case. specific situations can put him on par).

I originally liked the mechanic as a nice abstraction, but, in practice, it needs some tweaking.

your mag 50 hord should be protected by at least one or two firing position (2 x mag 10 heavy stubber/bolter positions)

Gives a goal to the Assault marine and no semi intelligent soldier woudl rush down a firing position whit out fire cover.

Use a mortar to force your marine under cover, etc.

Stop using DnD charge ork mentality, this is warfare in the 40k tactics and warfare are common knowledge you should use them unless you want to use mindless drones.

any typical assault from mass troops (WWI canadian initiative) :

- 1 heavy curtain bombardment with steady advance toward enemy line stopping only well behind enemy line to force a "go to ground" move are a retreat.

- 2 as the curtain advance so does your ground troop protected by the artillery shelling.

- 3 assault of the enemy line. (the enemy at the line will be under shell shock, prone or recovering from the go to ground, without reinforcement because the curtain blocks any line reinforcement from the back.

- 4 boodly trench war issue.

So a typical marine defended line charge would be a initial charge of 1 mag 30 followed closely by a 40-50. on 2nd round a bunch of fire teams (hidden roll for stealth etc) should open fire on the now exposed devastator with missile launchers etc.

That will force the devastator into cover and force the assault marine to jump to take hem out leaving your tactics to form a line to hold the mag 40-50 nearly undamaged yet.

Voila.

I think that AK 73 got the right idea here. Entrenched hordes should be much harder to rout then hordes standing in the open. The rules even support this as you only make a casualty when your weapon fire does at least 1 W damage. With a bit of cover, even a Heavy Bolter won't be always up to that trick.

AK's rule surely would help a bit out. here. The GM should give a 'cover' modifier depending on how much coverage there is and how much punishment that cover can absorb. Ranging from -10 for being behind an hedge to say -100 for being in an adamantine bunker with narrow fireslits and 2 yards of adamantine walls.

Sister Callidia said:

Max modifier is -60 in DW.

Alex

If you think that having simple 1 horde charge your SM is a good idea I think you should read Shun Tzu art of war. Khonate may do it once in a while but most chaos followers are workshipers of war and would not do anything so foolish. And most genestealer are bright enough to understand that unit mass suicided to the SM is a nice cover for a full blown squad of Pure Strain genestealer spring on the SM lines.

If you play this a la shooter style it's so going to get stale, you should probably change settings to somethign more scalable like DH where you can have small goblin like monsters that your pc can take on and suffer a bit. DW is really made IMO to be a all or nothing system. Anything that can kill a SM will do it one shot else it will die on the one shot the SM gives it, since SM are basically demi gods then they should go against god or demi gods.....

Sister Callidia said:

I simply apply the RAW cover rules to them- I like Alex's rule on folks under 100% cover or in wildly different positions (split into different buildings down an alley for example) modifying the to-hit bonuses, but I've found the basic cover rules do their job nicely when the enemy is dug in or the like.

So in the example of a group being inside a bunker, well you can't see anyone except the ones in the slit so your mag 50 horde is probably only providing a +10 or so bonus (you're bound to hit someone if you can go through the slit) to hit and the rockcrete bunker will give them something like a +16 bonus to their armor. Or they could blind fire into the bunker using the spray and pray rules hoping to hit someone with a lucky penetrating shot.

This also gets around the max +/- 60 bonus

And to the OP, I think your question has been answered- if you use one horde charging at a time things get stale, you have to be creative in your tactics or else yes, you'll end up in the situation you describe.

how exactly does horde-armor and cover work?

I haven't found any rules.