Reworking Shooting A Bit

Gunfire Shadowgram, Gary Settles

Man, am I getting tired of taking kids to doctors! Anyway, while I have some time to think, here's some ideas for where I want to go with shooting.

Suppression Markers

I'm going to go with an excellent idea that Eriochrome had, and have 2 ways for a unit to get a marker. Either you penetrate their armor with at least one shot, or you hit at least a certain percentage of that unit's models with your shots. Somewhere between 25-50%. Only one marker per shooting unit, even if both conditions are met.

Shooting Sequence

The basic sequence is going to be this:

1. Roll To Hit (BS vs. Ev + Modifiers)
2. Roll To Penetrate (AP vs. AV + Modifiers)
3. Divide Damage According To Strength/Toughness

I've been going around and around on how to make certain units tougher without adding a third possible roll to the shooting sequence. So here's what I've come up with. Each unit will have a Toughness stat, and each weapon will have a Strength stat. But instead of using these for a roll, we're just going to divide down the damage.

If your Strength is equal to, or greater than, the target's Toughness,  then any 1 shot that penetrates the enemy unit's armor will kill 1 model. But if the enemy's Toughness is higher than your weapon's Strength though, then you'll have to do the following:

1. Add Up All Of Your Penetrating Hits
2. Multiply Your Hits Times The Strength Of The Weapon To Get Your Total Damage Points
3. Divide These Damage Points by the Toughness Of The Target, Rounding Down
4. The Result Is How Many Models You Kill

Here's an Example:

A unit of Laansguard gets 3 penetrating hits with their S1 rifles on a unit of T2 Knights. This gives them 3 total damage points (S1 x 3 hits), with which they kill one Knight. The leftover point is discarded. You shot him through his 2nd heart, but didn't kill him. :)

Here's Another:

A unit of Knights gets 4 penetrating hits on a unit of Laansguard. The Knights' weapons are S2, but since that's higher than the T1 of the guard, you don't have to calculate anything. You just remove one model per pen. So 4 dead guard.

Simple enough?

This toughness system should allow us to scale things up to deal with big monsters and tanks pretty well. If you don't kill them, you'll at least suppress them.

I'm also thinking that each weapon could also have some sort of 'Explosive' stat that would allow you to kill more than one low-toughness model with a single high-strength shot. But only for certain weapons.