Kiton said:

See that's were you went wrong in my opinion. Look at my data again, specifically the Multi-Melta and the Multi-Melta on short range.

Look what doubling the penetration from 12 to 24 does. 11 turns turn into 3.4 9 turns into 2.8 and 710 turn into 12.3 turns. All this by adding the Melta property to a weapon. There's no target out there that isn't a vehicle that has 12 points of armour so it hardly matter if a weapon has 12 or 24 pen unless used against a vehicle. A simple change in Pen values (which is far easier and less problematic than rewriting the rules) or adding a weapon property (like the proposed Tank Hunter a few posts earlier or the already existing Razor sharp) can be done without a lot of side effects popping up all over the place.

There's no change in mechanics needed (unless you'd define weapon properties and damage / pen / armour values as mechanics) just a some numbers that need changing.

Kiton said:

We'd also be adding extra math to each and every attack. Never a good idea.

A very small amount of math. Can't remove all of it anyways.

There's quite a few weapons out there that shouldn't be ignoring personal armor entirely, yet should still be able to cause some damage to vehicles. As things are, this doesn't happen. You can't even count on Righteous Fury in this case. Even Melta weapons should be able to damage the front of a Russ outside the Melta bonus range, they're just far better at it once within. They just happen to be the lucky case ignoring personal armor all the time.

When we're talking side or rear armor though, Kraks, Plasma weapons, Pulse weapons [for the lighter stuff] and Bolters are all examples of weapons that would need to be doing double or triple their current penetration, but only when against vehicles, if we're to keep the rules as they are. Admittedly, Plasma is on the Melta level for ignoring personal armor, and thus can easily just take a straight boost to penetration, but the others? That's still a hole right now.

My (probably terrible and ill-thought-out) suggestion for a remedy for this situation:

Weapon quality: Anti-tank(x)

The weapon has been precisely engineered to crack the toughest vehicle armor. When used against a vehicle, multiply the attacks PEN value by x, however, against all targets, the attacker takes a -10 penalty to BS multiplied by X.

That rule is overly complicated and just makes it harder for a tank to hit another tank with it's main gun, which doesn't help the problem at all. Nor does it really represent tank or anti-tank combat very well.

I'd scrap the penalty to hit, and just have the Pen multiplied by the number in parentheses. That'd mean that normal people could survive being glanced by one, but a solid hit on a tank would take it out.

I still think that Structural Integrity needs halving though.

i think having multipliers factored into what already has addition and subtraction just makes combat clunkier and slower paced. Keeping any additional tank hunter trait to just a positive bonus to penetration would make more sense.

"Tank Hunter X - If this weapon is fired at a target that is a vehicle it gains + X penetration."

Since the Week 4 Update was rather disapointing for me (no news on Vehicles, AT Weapons) I've decided to write a set of new tools. Among them a Weapon creator that supports a list of weapon properties and a hotfix tester that can be used to modify damage and pen values without changing the weapon itself to test our various proposed fixes.
Currently the following is planned:

Weapon properties:

• Accurate
• Razorsharp
• Corrosive
• Lance
• Proven (X)
• Tearing

Hotfixes:

• Decrease SI by X
• Decrease Armor by X
• Increase Pen by X
• Increase Dmg by X
• Override Rng (X) - Replaces actuall rolling with fixed number.
• Override DoS (X) - Sets Degrees of Sucess to a fixed value.

I'm currently looking for suggestion on weapon properties and hotfixes that can be implemented.
I'm also looking for target numbers though this can wait until the tools are actually finished. So I'd like to know how long certain weapons should take to destroy certain targets (assuming 100% hit chance).

This issue has been going on forever in FFG

Some more recommendations

It's everlasting and nobody is willing to fix it. I swear it shouldn't take a bio titan 90 rounds to kill a land raider.

SirRunOn said:

Musclewizard said:

This also assumes that (1) "1200 Guardsmen" would be used as 1200 Solo units and not a Horde; (2) these NPCs can all cause RF - I was under the impression that OW kept RF potential only to characters with Fate Points, like PCs and important named NPCs, not a faceless mass even if they're Cadians.

Also it is sort of appropriate for a simultaneous volley of so many shots to hurt a tank…even if it doesn't explode it it shouldn't be completely shrugged off.

Kshatriya said:

Tanks are kinda known for effortlessly shrugging off small arms fire.

Kshatriya said:

Well there's no horde rules in OW and since RF was changed from exploding dice to mini-criticals NPCs can use them by default (though the GM may change this, as of page 183).
Once again, if you allow any weapon to deal damage to any target on a 10 even 1200 guardsman (treated as solo units) with sticks and stones could destroy a baneblade in one round.
Now I don't think that adding RF minimum damage for vehicles would really change anything. It might change the HtK from "Can't damage" or extremley high numbers (like 1000+) to SI * 10. Still 700 hits to destroy a Leman Russ is still idiotic and not the solution to the problem.

What is needed in my opinion is a rebalancing of the toughness of vehicles (compared to the damage of AT-Weapons).
To do this I'm still looking for opinions on how long it should take for weapons to destroy targets. I could make up my own numbers but I'd like to hear the communities option before I start balancing.

Morangias said:

I'd think 1200 people putting out 3600 lasbolts is going to do something to parts of the tank. Maybe not penetrate its armor, but to borrow tabletop terms, maybe glance it - damage weapons, freak out the driver with a sheer volume of fire, etc.

If you wanted to maintain the TT "feel" to vehicle destruction than it should happen through the critical hit. A Vehicle that is penetrated by a weapon probably will suffer a RF result you could add a value based on the damage dice to the critical roll (Say +1 per 2 dice?). This would give the Lascannon a real chance of disabling or killing even a Land raider in 1 shot! I would further suggest adding an additional +1 for any true "Ordinance" grade (Vehicle type in OW) weapons. This will make the Vanquisher the Tank killer it is meant to be!

Radwraith said:

I think that how the DH Aphcypa handled it centuries ago but that would requier a lot of rewriting of the rules for little gain in my opinion. I'd rather change the armour and SI values a little bit to achieve a reasonable combat length between AT Weapons and armoured targets.

I Like the idea of RF on each penetrating hit, after all, tanks are much more likely to be disabled then destroyed in a single hit. A special weapon quality i.e "armor defeating" which could have the AP of a target would be useful for anti tank weapons and mean that autocannons would not be preferable to krak missiles in terms of tank hunting! I do think that Devastating quality (which strips unnatural toughness) could reduce armor be a set amount against vehicles, such as 3 or 5. As for 2400 guardsmen being able to destroy a baneblade in six seconds, if 2400 lasguns can't heat up metal to the point where tracks fuse, sights break, turret movement is impaired etc, I don't see nid muscle powered weapons being able to do anything to it at all….

Wait. Did you actually do 1000 tests per weapon/vehicle combination instead of taking the average damage output?

Frankie said:

Correct. This isn't really a difficult problem for a modern processor (although I performed no optimization since that would probably take longer by itself than the all the tests combined since I have no experience optimizing matlab code). You may notice a few notes placed in the table where I used 100 or even only 10 tests to get my data since a single fight between a weapon and a vehicle took so long that a 1000 tests would have taken ~10 minutes+. In such cases I reduced the number of tests.

Since I used actual dice rolls HtK results are more accurate since weapons that are incapable of damaging a vehicle on average are still capable of damaging the vehicle at above average damage rolls which leads to longer combat but still a defeat of the vehicle at some point.

Would I use averages you'd see a lot more of "Can't damage".

Kshatriya said:

Not…really actually. You're ignoring the mass of the object you're shooting at. All of them would have to aim at a part vulnerable to warping. I don't recomend it, but if you can drive a much smaller tank through a burning barricade, the LR would most likely shrug off the majority of it. A driver would most likely not even hear the hits. Remember that he or she can only hear anything inside the tank via the intercom, as the noise is tremendous, and lasbolts do not fire a physical object to ping against the side of the tank even if they could.

A houserule I was bandying around ages ago for DW was to double the Penetration of all weapons when firing at vehicles (the idea being that it made Penetration more important against armoured targets). Would that help at all?

I appreciate the argument that multiplication is a bit annoying in combat.

Chastity said:

From what I can tell the new vehicle armour and SI values work great. Some tests I've done are avaible via the link in my signature plus I also tested the Leman Russ Battle Tank which also got some more reasonable TtK for all weapons. I'm currently learning for some important exams so I don't really want to devote to much time to doing another set of tests but I'll probably do one more once OW is released. The only problem that might still be there (besides some minor imbalances here and there) is Rate of Fire. I'm a bit concerned that the Autocannon might just be a little to tough in the hands of a good operator against some vehicles simply due to the amount of hits it could score per round, but so far that's only speculation.

I was always under the impression that the Autocannon was supposed to be a fairly decent anti-armour weapon anyway, although not so good as a Lascannon or Multi-Melta.