8th Edition: Vehicles are Dead, Long Live Vehicles!

Obviously today going to take a look at vehicles and how they are looking with the new edition.  As the title suggests, old vehicles are dead, but we have new ones.  While I personally liked the rules for vehicles, the changes presents opportunities and advantages over the old vehicle rules.  Keep in mind this is what we know so far.


What we know is that vehicles will have the same profile as everyone else, so no more armor values, hps etc.  Last week they gave us a glimpse of unit profiles with one being a dreadnought.  This gives us a good idea of how vehicles might stack, as a profile wise a dreadnought was middle of the road before in terms of armor and Hps, so we can extrapolate that things like leman russes will be tougher.

The important take aways here are that the dread has a T of 7, and a whopping 8 Wds, and a 3+ save.  What this adds up to is a much tougher vehicle than before.  The bright side of the rules change is also that vehicles will have more survivability.  Before, a vehicle had an Armor Value, which you rolled against to determine if you damaged it.  But this did not work the same as S vs T.  For example a S 8 weapon wounded a T8 model on a 4+.  For a vehicle, if the weapon was S 10, and the AV10, that was an auto penetration.  So now, having a T, a vehicle actually is going to be harder to wound, as there will pretty much be a lot less scenarios where an auto wound will happen.  And you have an armor save.  Essentially before your armor value rolled your armor save and toughness all into one.  So now, you will have more weapons that can potentially wound them, but a lot more chances of that wound being negated.

And to address the "lasguns will kill land raiders" argument, just going with the given examples of Boltguns and a Dreadnought, it basically will take a 10 man tactical squad 4 turns to kill the dread.  So its possible, but not going to be mowing vehicles down either.  While I don't love weapons being able to hurt everything, we don't know how exactly it is going to work in these extreme cases.  It may be that on any roll of 6 for any weapon, it wounds.  Or, you may need to roll a 6, and then roll again, depending on the S and T involved.  Now personally, I think for most things a 6 will do the job.  But thats a lot of luck to rely on.

With ap working differently, being modifiers instead of simply negating armor saves, this also helps vehicles out.  For the case of the Dread, with a 3+ save the lascannon with a -3 AP, that gives you a 6+ save, not amazing mind you, but it is an anti-tank weapon.  This also carries over to close combat, but in more ways than one.

One of the big boons to non combat vehicles with this system, is that since there is no armor values, the T and armor save remains the same in close combat.  Even if a leman russ has the same T and Wds and Save as a Dread, it will take a lot of punching to bring it down.  Now obviously there are going to be weapons that will be able to do more damage in CC, I would expect power fists to do D3 or D6 wounds like a lascannon.

The increased survivability in close combat is something that I am happy about, though don't expect weaker vehicles to last too long.  But having to worry about your weak rear armor in close combat is no longer an issue.  Watching out for mulit wound causing CC weapons will be something to be aware of though.

There is one thing I am concerned about, but will wait and see as a more complete picture emerges.  When shooting was discussed, it was mentioned that heavy weapons can move and be shot, with a minus 1 to BS.  With infantry this is a boon.  But vehicles are included in this as well.  So its a bit of good and bad.  On the good, as vehicles work currently, if you move 6" you can fire one weapon full BS and the rest as snap shots.  On the bad, this makes the already meh BS of IG vehicles worse if you want to move and shoot your vehicles.

Now, we don't have the whole picture and most likely this is just the general rule and types of vehicles will get around this no problem.  At least that is what I hope.  With blast weapons gone, many of the standard weapons on our vehicles will have to be rethought tactically speaking.  Again though, not something to get too upset about as we still have more to see and it is likely that vehicles will have ways around this so as not to have completely neutered shooting.

I will miss the old rules, but I am looking forward to the new rules vehicles will have and the opportunities that it presents.

Cadia Stands!
GG