Yes, the point is to make relying on ARM a more viable strategy. It's a significant boost to anything that wants to Move without cover and can risk taking a hit (HI and TAGs also benefit significantly). Which is why 3 is "increase the price of Impetuous because now it's not really much of a negative": people already argue that Impetuous is basically a free order. Re: Bikes. If its too much of a buff that's mechanically quite easy to fix: increase the price of bikes to account for their value. You can think of that as 3A. But the main disadvantage of not being able to claim cover is losing the -3 BS not the losing the +3 ARM. The way the FTF mechanic works BS MODs are MUCH more important than ARM mods. The exception are troops using DTWs: but those are less effective as well, because they do less DAM. The potentially more concerning issue is actually how this works with Smoke + CC. Because it has the potential of making that play style significantly stronger if the cost increase to Impetuous troops doesn't offset it enough. Dogs in particular would bear watching because with TI it means that they don't need to worry about AP.
I think allowing AP to half the total ARM (including cover) or even allowing AP to completely ignore the +3 ARM cover bonus would make it more widely utilised and powerful.
That helps AP but doesn't help ARM. AP is only really undervalued because ARM is. Incidentally that's already how Firewalls work.
How about just giving higher ARM to armored units? I mean, mimetism is widely available and it gives a 3 bonus, ODD or TO give a 6 bonus (marker states apart) but a supposedly powerful HI just sports a 2 or 3 bonus against a lowly LI or MI...
I like @inane.imp s idea to remove +3 ARM bonus from cover. I think getting 3 ARM 'for free' when its an expensive characteristic does mess with its fundamental value as a characteristic. Personally rather than reducing dam on ballistic weapons to compensate I would do something like +1 ARM for LI / REMs +2 ARM for MI / HI +3 ARM for TAGS Since that scales arm being more effective generally (But not in cover) to the things that need it more. Heavy TAGS being close to immune to small arms fire apart from crits would be cool and even help make the crit mechanic more acceptable I think. It would also: Nerf templates a little (currently a bit good) Buff ARM as a characteristic a little (currently not good enough) Nerf cheap troops with little ARM like WB and SK a little (currently a bit too good). I don't think that way would have quite the same cascade effects as lowering BS damage, but I could be wrong. The other thing I thought about is doctoring killing your own guys. That's kinda weird and un fun. I think maybe if you fail a doctor roll the unconscious troop should go to a 'stablised' state instead of dead, and then count as alive for victory points, but unable to be doctored again. It feels like doctoring your own guys should unequivocally be good, and often it's pretty marginal game wise anyway. You could make cubes matter somehow to it if you wanted (e.g. models with cubes get 'cubevac'd rather than stabilised and add their VP to the doctors own rather than staying on the table in place)
If you went down that route you'd lose a lot of fidelity. But running ARM like BTS is certainly doable: as a baseline LI/SK/WB = ARM 0 MI = ARM 3 HI = ARM 3/6, TAGs = ARM 6/9 (with some exceptional units not fiting that mold). Jotums are really the only thing that would cause problems (assuming you didn't want ARM12), but you could get around that by giving them another wound instead. You could easily combine this with AP = (ARM + Cover)/2 as proposed above. The absolute easiest option is to revise the points formula to significantly lower the cost of ARM. But that doesn't do anything to resolve the fact that templates stripping cover ARM mods significantly distorts the values of some option (looks meaningfully at LSGs and Chain Rifles), although again doing this in combination with AP affecting Cover would (a little). But I think the changes that making cover less important would bring could be interesting: cover is important because it simultaneously increases the odds of you winning a FTF, decreases the odds of you losing the FTF and reduces the likelihood of bad consequences from the FTF.
They just need to make ARM cheaper in terms of points. That's it. And make Symbiote Armor, Submachine Guns, Posthumans, and a few other things more expensive.
Making ARM cheaper instead of making units with ARM tougher makes lists have even more troops in them, ie more Spammy. The game is too Spammy already, despite multiple attempts to address that.
Strictly speaking; no. It doesn't make the spammy lists much spammier, because the spammy lists rely on ARM 0 or ARM 1 units which would be unaffected by a reduction in ARM pricing. Potentially there's some "spammy" lists that might be able to fit one more WB model if it doesn't only contain spam. (Also, the "multiple attempts to address" it has typically failed because each time they bolster the more expensive units, they roll out increase ways of dealing with expensive units by cheap units - so if they were trying, they weren't trying very hard)
Why not make AP a constant modifier to ARM like -3 or so? Halving gets weird results like ARM 1 gets unaffected, and you strip more the bigger the ARM score is. At least make it round down, so that lightest ARM can be negated.
It would make HI's less valuable, since light" HI's would end up with no ARM and heavier HI's would also loose a little bit more of ARM. HI's and ARM need more love than AP ammo.
A feature of the Australian meta at the moment is 1 or 2 HI fuelled by spam. In this case making the HI cheaper just results in more spam to fuel them. Dropping the price of ARM is only a partial fix: you also need to make "spam" troops less viable or more expensive. I'm actually kinda ok with this approach. But find the second and third order effects of removing the ARM bonus from worth thinking about.
Why is this bad? The game has plenty good tools to deal with rambos. Also, if you make ARM values rise like proposed wouldn't this make the 1-2 HI fuelled by spam even stronger? Even if you reduce the spam, having more reliable ARM just means those HI would need to spend less orders to go somewhere to do the killing and perhaps the button pushing.
Conversely, you could drop the strength of cheap DTW slightly. They're still auto hit that can be fielded by cheap warbands but have less of an impact on HI.
There's a big "depends on" attached to that, though. An order tends to cost about 10 points, and will lowered ARM price on one or two HI really accomplish this much? I mean, I'm quite interested in the approach to reduce the DAM values and removing ARM bonus from Cover, not least because it'll proportionally make CC at PH 11-12 more on par with BS Attacks, but simply doctoring the points is a viable means of forcing a shift in the meta. Especially if combined with a few other tweaks proposed such as increasing the price of a Regular order by a point.
You've pretty much stated my position. And you're right 1pt / point of ARM doesn't change much for a single or even two HI. But it does start to make a difference for a whole core.
While removing the +3 ARM cover bonus would improve the relative value of armour scores, I'm really not a fan as it would erode the tactical significance of finding cover and working your way around behind or to flank enemy positions. Ultimately, all it would do would be to reinforce the value of good BS and BS modifiers, something that doesn't need doing any further.
One thing I recalled: why visibility zone MODs stack with CH MODs? Like, I'm an Intruder standing inside a Smoke template, and I open fire at you. You get -6 from receiving a BS attack through Zero Visibility Zone, -3 from my CH: Camouflage, -3 from Surprise Shot and another -3 if I'm in cover. Why would cover and CH MODs matter if you don't see me in the first place?
though i don't have played enough games in N3 to have an opinion on cover yet but just an random idea that the max cover bonus is relevant to the model class eg LI get +1 armor MI +2 etc...
As long as there are exceptions, or "remastering" of certain units. From my POV, most of OSS seems to bump everything down one notch in terms of stats / class. Eg. a Deva has medium infantry stats, but counts as a light unit; Yadu are medium infantry, but have stats of HI; and OSS HI are "Superheavy HI", like the S5 of other factions. It seems to be the Aleph gimmick; and is part of the reason why their units cost so much, pointwise.
