Battleshock redesign discussion

[hivefleetkerrigan]

The current general consensus is that battleshock will rarely ever be failed so it won't matter for most games. My general thought is that GW made leadership too good for most units and that using 2d6 does not give enough granularity for fine tuning leadership.

I think that battleshock should be a 3d6 test as it allows for fine tuning leadership. It also allows for an exact 50% chance to fail with a leadership of 11+.

Spitballing different units leadership values here:
13+ grots
12+ gaunts
11+ guard
10+ sisters
9+ marines
8+ custodes
7+ primarchs and special characters

[gauntlet]

I have not played the game, so my opinion is dismissable.
I think the rules for battleshock are ok,
- consequence of failing is reasonable but not too harsh.
- the leadership test on 2d6 is ok.
The problem is not with the general rules for battleshock.

The problem is that those armies or unit rules trying to gain advantage from Battle-shock are inconsequential. Either has no effect when it does occur, or it occurs unreliably in the wrong place or time.

Once per battle for Shadow in Warp is not like lore. In lore it's a constant blanket aggravation not a targetable weapon. It does affects mostly Psykers, either nulifying them or causing them to over exert. The old -1ld for Psychic tests SiTW was good.

I have many, many suggestions for alternative new SiTW.
easiest is nothing related to battleshock - All enemy abilities with Psychic also have the Hazardous keyword.

EDIT: Your weapons or abilities that cause battle-shock in your turn, are automatically negated at the start of your opponents turn. Units should remain Battle-shoced, unless a unit makes a successful test in their Command Battle-shock phase.

[piersonsmuppet]

Jul 19, 2023 12:41:12 GMT gauntlet said:

EDIT: Your weapons or abilities that cause battle-shock in your turn, are automatically negated at the start of your opponents turn. Units should remain Battle-shoced, unless a unit makes a successful test in their Command Battle-shock phase.

This would make abilities that Battle-shock during the Command phase (e.g., SitW) worse, since a unit could recover immediately after failing. Would need errata to the Core rules, which GW is typically hesitant to make (the digital nature of the Core rules this edition may reduce their reluctance).

[mattblowers]

It's worthless. Leadership in general has had no impact in the game for 3 editions now. Even before it was somewhat minimal except to sweep a unit in combat. That was a fairly frequent occurrence in older editions. At least synapse is no longer the terrible handicap to us it used to be.

[gauntlet]

Jul 19, 2023 13:33:39 GMT mattblowers said:

It's worthless. Leadership in general has had no impact in the game for 3 editions now. Even before it was somewhat minimal except to sweep a unit in combat. That was a fairly frequent occurrence in older editions. At least synapse is no longer the terrible handicap to us it used to be.

I feel that to GW the most important aspect is that Battle-shock is a cool sounding word, better than moral-check and it worth having hostily implemented token rules so kids have an excuse to say the phrase out loud.

[yoritomo]

You want to make leadership matter? Have a unit pass a leadership check in order to use a stratagem.


The problem with leadership is that you don’t take enough of them for the law of large numbers to take effect. More leadership tests taken means more leadership tests failed, which makes leadership matter.

[Iryan]

It used to be that failing a morale check would basically cost your unit its entire turn, as it would be forced to make a retreat move towards the nearest table edge (and be destroyed if it reached that edge), and could not do anything else. Now, that is not necessarily the most fun thing to have happen to you, to randomly have a unit decide to run away and waste its whole turn. But it is not really significantly worse than, you know, having your unit simply obliterated in the enemy shooting phase, so yeah.

There is a bit of a game design challenge with finding a balance between how common these checks are, how likely it is to fail, and how big the impact of a failed check is.

If the checks are common but they are unlikely to fail, then the impact cannot be too big, else it feels really [Unfun and Unfair] when once upon a blue moon you fail and possibly lose the game because of it. It would also make it extremely powerful to give leadership debuffs.
If the checks are rare but are likely to fail, then they can have a bigger impact. In that case, abilities that force additional checks become significantly powerful, although these can again become very swingy and end up feeling bad for either player depending on the outcome. Then again, that is not much different from having a hammerhead whiff a shot with its railgun. So that would be acceptable. But this would mean that abilities that reduce the chance of a test or prevent its effect completely become very unfun for the player trying to lean into morale effects.

If you were to fully redesign the system, one way to address these would be to have various tiers of failure/success. You could have leadership checks where you roll 2d6, add your leadership value, and if the result is below certain thresholds, different bad things happen. Like, if the result is lower than 14, you get penalties to hit or something, if it is lower than 12, your OC drops to 0 and you cannot use stratagems, if the result is below 10, the unit cannot do anything this turn except fall back or normal moves. Something like that. A bit granularity in the results could help the balancing and design. This would also have the benefit of making it so a higher leadership is better AND a higher roll is better. Which is nice.


Since a major rework like that is definitely not going to happen, how could the current system be improved?
Personally it seems like currently the three aspects (number of tests, success chance, and impact) are all low. There are some factions that significantly increase the number of tests and/or success chance, like nids and chaos knights, but since the impact is low, that is not really that worth it. The main issue is that, if your unit is not crucially holding an objective or you were going to use a strat on it this turn or you were going to fall back with it from melee, battleshock has no effect at all. It is not gonna stop a unit in a gunline from blasting you apart, for instance. So one way you could make it more impactful would be to add a combat debuff to the whole thing.
A simple but significant one would be something like adding "battleshocked units get -1 to all hit rolls and wound rolls". Depending on circumstances, that is gonna reduce a unit's damage output by somewhere around 25-75%, which is significant, but does not feel nearly as bad as "the unit loses its turn completely lol". Not a perfect solution, but something like this seems like an improvement and compromise. And yes I know this means that battleshock will be less effective if your units have stealth etc. but there is no good way to address that.

Of course, any effects that affect leadership or force leadership tests would need to be looked at and adjusted appropriately. For instance, shadow in the warp COULD still give all enemies within 6'' of a synapse creature a -1 to all battleshock checks, maybe even in addition to the once-per-game army-wide forced check. Personally I like the concept of the rule as it is currently, it is just that the combination of "unlikely to trigger" and "often with little-to-no-impact when it does trigger" makes it pretty toothless and unsatisfying. Who knows, maybe the codex will adjust the rule in a meaningful way, or add synergies that make it more powerful and worthwhile.

Edit: ok I did not realize that [crabby spelled with p] would be too much for the board's profanity filter.

[piersonsmuppet]

I think a step in the right direction for improving Battle-shock is preventing rr’s for the affected unit. The effect is minor but can have meaningful impact.

[gauntlet]

Jul 19, 2023 16:43:27 GMT piersonsmuppet said:

I think a step in the right direction for improving Battle-shock is preventing rr’s for the affected unit. The effect is minor but can have meaningful impact.

The battle-shock and army rules that manipulate it are not perfect but I think the introduction into the game is a success. Game developers have introduced it cautiously, having marginal effect 10%? on any given outcome, not significant but players have to be aware and plan for it happening occassionally. I am glad it was not overdone like an all emcompasing panacea for weakness in rules elsewhere.

[piersonsmuppet]

I agree, I personally like how Battle-shock has been implemented compared to Morale in previous editions. However, the lack of Battle-shock affecting all phases of the game makes the application of it a niche within a niche. While the rule implementation is a success imo, the strategic implementation of it looks wanting (from my own and other observations of extreme lack of impact). I would expect a Core facet of the game to make some kind of impact in every game, large enough that a player can capitalize on the occurrence but small enough that games aren't determined solely by it.

[gauntlet]

Jul 19, 2023 17:55:35 GMT piersonsmuppet said:

I agree, I personally like how Battle-shock has been implemented compared to Morale in previous editions. However, the lack of Battle-shock affecting all phases of the game makes the application of it a niche within a niche. While the rule implementation is a success imo, the strategic implementation of it looks wanting (from my own and other observations of extreme lack of impact). I would expect a Core facet of the game to make some kind of impact in every game, large enough that a player can capitalize on the occurrence but small enough that games aren't determined solely by it.

Perhaps more rules should say, You can do this, unless the unit is battle-shocked.
e.g. If Battle-shocked, then No Advance movement. No Charging. No Pile in. (Some poor examples here, as they yet again penalize melee.) Maybe, you can only shoot at the nearest visible target.

EDIT: Hrumph!!! Every rules problem in 40k can be traced to a single source. The guns are too good. That was why the setting is GrimDark, so you cannot have real gun technology.

[N.I.B.]

SitW is not a strong army wide special rule, but after 4-5 games now I wouldn't call it very weak either. My sample is too small to draw any conclusion so it's more of a feeling, but in at least two games it had a decent effect on the scoring. In one game it took 15 points from my opponent in turn 5, giving me a solid win instead of a minor win.
The 'can't use stratagems' is harder to quantify, but in one of my games it really messed up my opponent's plan.

[trashcan01]

I have a two suggestions. Maybe adding both would be too oppressive for some lists? Here goes:

- units under Half strength have -1 penalty when rolling Battle-shock test
- Battle-shocked unit to have a cumulative -1 hit/-1 wound and no re-rolls of any kind (Advance, Charge, weapon and special abilities etc.) in addition of having what is has now

Complex rules seem very hard to implement. The idea of 10th was to simplify. 

I'm fine with frequency of successes and fails. Meaning on average units pass the Battle-shock test.
I mean, even the basic Guardsmen are brave, trained, (brainwashed) and professional soldiers, not to mention Space Marines that are superhuman.

edit - reading the previous comments I see some things were already suggested. Cool. I love @Iryan idea of enemy units within Synapse having -1 on Battle-shock checks!

Imagine having Shadows in the Warp detachment that has all the rules above in effect.  I'd play that. (Balanced out with some unit choices somehow).

[nidsallday]

what really gets me is that OC0 is one of the, if not the, strongest part of being battle-shocked, and hence the strongest effect of ShitW. but all it takes is one Vexilla and boom, its like battle-shock didnt even happen (if you are even lucky enough the opponent fails the test on exactly that one unit you needed it to). and this just seems like a poor design-choice to me. why would you make it so easy to circumvent one of the core rules of the game?

everything else, there are so many suggestions made by you i can only second (like yori suggested "law of large numbers", just make battle-shock roles more common, or the multiple suggested +1 to BS/WS (so it can stack with -1 to hit/wound), or disabling abilities on shocked units,...)

[joysan76]

personally i don't think that the general rule is a problem

if there is a problem is that our wide army rule is, the most of the time, useless and too much randomic

so IF there is something to redesign is the ability we have and not the rule

how to do it...

1) not more ocne per battle, but any synapse unit may do it in the same way the imperative was working, so having more attempt we have mroe chance that at elast one time we hit an unit that we hope will fail the check, bad thing... we will add more diceroll to check it to the game slowing it...

2) change the rule, no more force the test to the whole enemy army but give a permanent -1 to the enemy battleshocks, so with neurotyrant they will get -2, a screaming killer+neurotyrant on the board will force a -3