Invent a Rule!

[Duke Ramulots]

Only for shooting out of a building.

[yabbadabba]

5 models per floor may shoot, yes.

A cap that prevents you from entering more than, say, 20 models per floor would have made sense..

Rather than common sense? I know - I know washmymouthoutwithsoapandwaterwhataridiculousideam uttermutter

[Urgat]

5 models per floor may shoot, yes.

A cap that prevents you from entering more than, say, 20 models per floor would have made sense..

Well, 3 floors, 60 models, I'm not sure it's gonna help much

[Flash Felix]

G'day chaps, thanks for discussing the rules I proposed earlier.

that's a fair point. I was in the woods the previous week, and visibility into the woods was quite far, several hundred meters easily.

There's a difference between one person having 100m visibility in a forest, and a whole unit. Even if you subscribe to the 1:1 scale, that unit of 30 is not easily going to see the enemy, even if spearman #19 can; bump that unit of 30 models up to 300 troops and it only gets worse. More importantly, the unit commander might not see, and he's the one that's meant to order the charge/shooting. As someone who's done some soldiering in forests, it's very difficult to see far, as a unit, and to control movement. One person might see the enemy, the rest of the section often can't.

I know that relying on GW fluff is always fraught with danger, but here's what it says on p118 of the BRB, under 'Forests';

-Forests are excellent places for troops to lurk in ambush- the choking foliage offers a great deal of protection against missile fire.
-Forests are mysterious terrain - who knows what hellspawn lurks in there?

So clearly GW wants forests to be exactly that; dense and thick. It's hard for hellspawn to lurk behind 3 spaced trees after all. What they haven't done is design the rules to match that description/fluff/intent.

I actually tried that in a game, even my unit of 25 really struggled to get through the forest effectively....moving 3" with my dwarfs? no thanks.

Fair enough, I play Dwarves too. This will make forests hard going for any infantry unit, as it should, but not impossible. It means you can use forests to anchor a unit, as happened in real life (see Agincourt as an example). If you don't like slow movement, then don't move through them.

Yes, I know, it's a game of dragons and mages and daemons. We don't know how they work, but we do know how forests affect line of sight and movement of formed units. Making things realistic where we can provides a foundation for the fantastic elements of the game, making them stand out even more. Otherwise, why can't my Hammerers have M8? That would be awesome! Who cares if they've got short legs, as long as they're pointed correctly, noone can complain.....

Im in the camp of what you see is what you get. If the forest has three trees then it has three trees, if you have a unit of 40 grave guard, its 40, not 400. If you play with the 10 to 1 ratio then how do you use buildings? Is one building a whole village?

That works for you, and fair enough. Me, I want my 130 odd Dwarves to be a real army, not a company. If I wanted to play skirmish fantasy, I'd play Warmachine. So for me, I think of models as representing 10-50 individuals. 1-5,000 warriors is an army, though a small one. War machines represent a battery of 4-6 weapons. Some things don't scale like this; monsters are individuals to my mind, but this makes sense. A single dragon shouldn't just fly in and kill 10 men with it's attacks, thunderstomp and breath weapon; what a pathetic creature. Instead it slaughters 100-500, because that's what a badarse lizard should do.

Buildings represent a farm, village or town. I prefer this scale in my mind, as it's much more cinematic than a clash between 100 men on each side.

Personally I think it's good that Large Targets arn't easier to hit in this edition. It's silly enough that S 2-3 can wound a T6+ Monster so as long as Greater Daemons (for example) don't get more wounds and access to better wardsave I can't favor that idea. The old +1 ToHit from 7th Ed also implied that those medieval shooting weapons were a lot more accurate than they actually were.. Bows and Crossbows fires in very inaccurate archs - in reality you wouldn't even try to fire on a single "model", let alone a flier..

I don't think S2 should wound T7+. I'd change this back to the 7th Edition wound table, or I'd increase it to wounding on a 7, 8 or 9.

The thing is we're comparing Crossbows shooting at a man to Crossbows shooting at a greater Daemon. All else being equal (range and movement), the Daemon should be easier to hit because it's bigger. If the weapon is inherently inaccurate, this should be reflected in the weapon's rules or the BS of the shooter. But hitting a Plague Furnace should be easier than hitting a Skaven.

And of course a skilled marksman can hit an individual person with a crossbow or bow. It might take a lot of practice, but it can be done.

I also don't see what the problem is with making Hills that block Line of Sight. The GW modular hills are a bit "low", yes - why not just make your own. And again, a place where the terrain is a total rollecoaster wouldn't be a likely spot where two medieval armies decided to engage each other.

Not everyone has the time, skill or inclination to make bigger hills, or the space to store them. I'm not saying that hills should be mountains, rather they should be higher than 5' in model terms. A low rise should be enough to mask cavalry. Even the 'flat' steppes of Russia have undulations and dips which allow concealment and cover. 'Hills' in warhammer represent these, rather than the foothills of the Alps.

Right. But such a mangrove would be concidered "impassable terrain" rather than forrest in Warhammer terms I would think.
Nobody in their right mind, regardless of unit-type, would walk into such a bush in the heat of battle.. Would they? I mean: Warhammer games captures a few "minutes" of 'real time'..

A very dense forest could be impassable terrain. If you've ever walked through an orchid you would find that visibility drops quickly. Try doing it with 30 mates in a single wide rank, and even an orchard on flat ground with no undergrowth and nicely spaced trees will slow your movement down. Not stop it, but you'll need to keep dressing the line and making sure you're still in a rank.

I've spent hundreds of hours marching in lines with 100 plus others. It's hard enough to do on an open parade ground. Doing it in even a 'nice' forest like an orchard or pine plantation would be bloody hard. Doing it in natural forest would be impossible at speed. Hence, no marching in forests is a realistic limitation in my view.

[Duke Ramulots]

You do loose ranks in a forest.

[The bearded one]

You do loose ranks in a forest.

You don't lose ranks, but steadfast, and skirmishers become stubborn.

[DaemonReign]

With regards to BS-based shooting and penalties for various models I believe it comes down to complexity (of rules) versus the issue of realism.
Let's see how we could make it more realistic:
Single models (infantry sized) should at the very least be effected just as Skirmishers - i.e. -1 ToHit minimum.
If you're at 'long range' that -1 should arguably be doubled, so -4 total (but this shouldn't apply to Monstrous Infantry/Cavalry I suppose).
Infantry Sized Fliers should arguably always be concidered to have 'Hard Cover' before you even apply other penalties for range etcetera.
Large Targets (given the above) could perhaps be without any penalty, but as soon as they're flying it should become slightly harder to hit them.
Ranked units, then, well something like +1 ToHit for every 20/30 models in the unit would be reasonable I suppose.

And now we can argue each and every detail of this, but the reason I typed it out was merely to underscore how the RAW currently is waay simpler and while at bit 'meh' at times perhaps that's not all a bad thing.

I actually like the general rule of 1's always failing and 6's succeeding for the same reason - I was just reminded the other day that there's actually rules in the BRB for "hitting on a 7" (i.e. first roll a 6, then you need another roll of 4+) and well, fine.. although necessary?? I don't know..

[Jericho]

Didn't read all 24 pages of replies

Jericho's (Possibly) New idea for Disrupting Steadfast:
Steadfast could be calculated by subtracting the number of ranks of the Disrupting unit from the total ranks of the unit being flanked.

So consider Unit A, a bus of 5x8 fighting against two units, Unit B (5x5 unit on the front) and Unit C (5x4 unit in Unit A's flank). In this combat, Steadfast would calculate thusly:
Unit A: 8 - 4 = 4 ranks
Unit B: 5 ranks

A unit of 100 Skaven slaves 20 ranks deep being fully disrupted by 10 Archers doesn't quite seem fair, but Unit A in the example above retaining Steadfast despite being outnumbered doesn't make sense either. I think the subtraction method is a good compromise and doesn't make Empire Detachments hella broken.

[Flash Felix]

And now we can argue each and every detail of this, but the reason I typed it out was merely to underscore how the RAW currently is waay simpler and while at bit 'meh' at times perhaps that's not all a bad thing.

Emphasis added

I agree, it's very important that any proposed rules change be simple, or at worst, only increase game complexity by a small amount. There's enough to remember as it is in Warhammer......

Which is why I proposed what I felt was a fairly simple set of modifiers to BS shooting. If this is too complex, then maybe it's not workable. Or it might be that there's room to add a few more (like that flying modifier or the -1 for shooting at individuals as it was in 7th Edition).

This can only be determined through playtesting. The best rule amendments we propose should actually seek to reduce the number of things we have to remember.

[Gradek]

While in general, I like striking in initiative order (regardless of charge), I think there should be an exception for lance wielding cavalry, which I think should strike first when charging.

[Urgat]

I actually like the general rule of 1's always failing and 6's succeeding for the same reason - I was just reminded the other day that there's actually rules in the BRB for "hitting on a 7" (i.e. first roll a 6, then you need another roll of 4+) and well, fine.. although necessary?? I don't know..

It's always been there, and in all my WFB career, I've never managed one 7+. And Mork knows that with gobs I've had opportunities