AP on Artillery (except on perhaps an Arrow VI, not saying that combo is balanced though) doesn't make sense.

AP on OTHER stuff there should be NO problem with. I find defense SEs to be very annoying (particularly hardened) and saying that AP comes at very little cost is not a very good conjecture. You think all those SS mechs loaded with AP are amazing? Then how come the general concensus is that they are unplayable? Their damage output comes at a great cost of their heat dial, that is how the SS mechs stay at a competitive pt value. HLs (my beating dummie and residential armor SE kings) dont' suffer from horrid heat dials as much.

Something that takes 2 damage off every attack at a high defensive value (ie: many assault mechs) is an awesome thing to behold IF USED CORRECTLY. If you see something with AP, don't waltz over to it unless you are planning to nuke the thing.

Wizkids' impression of Artillery bombshells is that they are equivalent to mini nukes. :P

SC will be quite screwed if hardened armour is the ONLY SE allowed to ignore AP bcos they have ZERO units with HA. But well...they still got Arnis.

Easy Fix.

Units using AP increase the defense modifier of Heavy armor and Decoy units by +1, and the defense of Hardened and Reactive armor units by +2. This modifier replaces the Hindering Terrain Modifier and is discarded when using indirect fire.

Artillery using AP do damage to an opposing armored unit only when thier attack roll is great enough to hit the armored unit's defense value. Line of Sight gives a +6 to this comparison.

Okay. Makes it harder to hit these armored gargantuans, and only hurts artillery a little. Artillery can still get lucky, but in most cases is best used shelling stuff without armor. Also dosen't make the armor peircing SE useless, and if you don't want to try to hit that 25, you can turn off AP and try for a 23.

I know for a fact that the Highlanders employ AP in their Artillery as well as Steel Wolves, & The Republic.

As far as artillery is concerned most the artillery pieces could easily do 3-4 damage based on the point conversion from CBT to DA. The Arrow IV could do 4 per missile and launch 2 a turn if not all in one turn. With the exception of the Liao Arrow IV I do believe WK is putting a limit on the damage an artillery piece can do while making it worth having arty by putting AP on a select few. Since SSw were originally AP fanatics in the DA set of course there going to get more units with it. But now it seems they're leaning more towards ECM w/ Streaks.

As far as infantry doing AP I with rifles I just looked in my Fed Suns book and they have this thing called the Thunderstroke Gauss Rifle for Battle Armor wich could easily explain why the Kage does AP as for the rest its the SRM's (This includes all factions).

As for AP being cheap, well yes it is, even in todays world bullets for handguns can be cheaply made to get through Kevlar vests. Slap on depleted uranium on a 30mm round for mere chump change for the govt and you've got a tank killer. This goes for tungsten, what do you think causes that light in your light bulb.

And yes Crimson I read all your posts fully the numbers were for Mercy. As it seems I'm the only advocate for AP here on this forumn and have to debate seperately with each of you.

SS Arrow IV - 51pts. Nuff said!We are talking, primarily at least, about artillery. You know, the stuff that can shoot most of the way across the table! You don't "waltz" into artillery, you run the #### away from it.

As far as the 'mini nuke' idea; how come when I'm at the very edge of the blast radius - the point beyond which even infantry is not affected by it - it still penetrates my Hardened Armor. Obviously, we can't talk real-world, or even real-physics, when discussiing this subject. I'm looking for balance.

I'm also not interested in what some believe are unusable pieces. Many believe HL are unusable in their pure form. I play HL pure quite often, and win much more than I lose.

I don't agree with the general consensus that armor SEs are all useless.

Armor, especially Hardened and Reactive armors, are very, very powerful - and they need a hard counter-ability to combat them.

AP on units is easy to deal with - stay away, or beat the AP out of them. This is how I won the Faction War using my Republic Hellstar.

AP on artillery is a tougher proposition - and this has much less to do with the power of AP than it has to do with the over-powering of artillery.

I'm not against suggestions that mitigate the power of Armor Piercing if people really are deadset against it, but I think the only major issue is that of AP on artillery.

Let's solve the major problems first before we move on to other tweaks.

To the author.

What you are suggesting has been mentioned previously.

One thought was:

+1 to the defense of the target if it has heavy armor vs an AP attack.
+2 to the defense of the target if it has Hardened or Reactive armor vs an AP attack.

Personally I have no problems with this idea. Yes this makes some units with hardened or reactive armor pretty hard to hit ... but honestly ... they PAID for that defense .. they SHOULD be hard to hit. And if you do 2-3 damage or more and you think it makes it too hard to hit then just bite the bullet and turn off the AP to increase your chances of hitting.

Just another general comment:

If anyone here honestly believes armor SEs are useless, why don't you go ask people who played at the Marquee if they agree with you? It looks like a huge number of players played the Liao Hellstar, and the vast majority of them who played it won every single match. Hardened Armor is the reason why.

In the real world, Artillery with AP is the only true danger to things like Hardened Armor - but it's too good of a counter. So the issue is not AP, but Artillery with it able to hit you from an entire table away while you are tied up.

The SSw A4 only needs a 5 to hit centre dot for 2 damage AP - that alone can make people think armor is worthless.

I suggest this fix, similar to something I said in a different post:

After determining where the artillery shell lands, compare the total attack roll against the defense of all units caught in the blast radius. If the total attack value of the roll is lower than the defense of any hit units, those units take -1 damage from the attack.

This means most assault mechs would only take 1 damage AP from artillery - almost nothing to a quality mech like the Hellstar.

armor SE is not likly to change so deal with the rules as they sit.

Mason, I specifically stated that AP on Artillery and AP on other units is an entirely seperate issue.

The majority of you are blindly making suggestions that absolutely defeat the purpose of one SE to make another all-powerful, because you think thats the way it should be.

AP +2 to hit on armor SEs is absolutely the most brain-dead fix I've heard all day, it defeats the purpose of AP. I don't want a 25 to hit that hardened atlas, thats why I'm using AP to take it down. It'd be like, "Hey lets give a penalty to hitting infantry with AnP, because I bet it's hard to tag those little guys by raking a machine-gun across the ground"

Fix a real problem. Hardened armor rocks. Play with arrow IVs in battletech, then tell me why they ONLY have 2 damage.

Now taking into consideration that AP is supposed to just, in reality, punch through the target. It doesn't explode or anything like that. Making this point, note that in real life rounds like these are extremely ineffective against soft targets; targets without armour. These types of targets are represented by units, yes, without defensive SE. I was thinking thus: units do half their damage (rounded up) to units without armour.
Any thoughts on this idea?

sorry ducky, not a good idea:

1) I could just not use the AP SE on non-armored targets
2) mechs carry multiple tons of ammo, likely different types of ammunition if AP is included.

AP ammo in CBT is a FedSuns invention of the 3060's, along with several other new autocannon ammo types. AP ammo ... ugh, I wish I had my field manual with me... long story short, the AP ammo is tipped with something else, but that doesn't mean it doesn't have an explosive force of some kind. What AP game does in the board game is that you roll for crit hits for every location you hit, regardless of whether there is armor left or not. It's scary. ;-

@nightmoor

The marquee is not a good example. If you always played with a random set of figs armor is fine just the way it is. This happens very rarely so you will almost always face ap artillery and units. Under the current rules a mech without armor SE but a high def is a much better buy than an armored one

It is very hard to adjust se in the game because a single point either way can make a huge difference in playability.

Fluff wise AP as a single solid shell should not ignore decoy but other examples of AP (ie more rounds, better training) could.

I think ideally you would want AP to do less damage to armor but have a better chance of inflicting some kind of critical damage. I do not know if this game can model that. Perhaps you could replace the damage of an AP round by something random.

I think the game can handle more complicated SE interaction but that gets away from one of the games intentions of being easy to learn and having everything you need right on the base of the fig.

AP ammo actually has no drawbacks, aside from cost. See, the thing I like about Battletech is that more powerful technology doesn't have some big drawback for being more powerful, it's just technological advancement ;-P


Ahh, the joys of no balance. Well, unless you're working with costs ;-

How about a compromise.
For the armor piercing to work,
+2 to defense of target for hardened and reactive
+1 for heavy armor

However if the shot misses this higher defense number, but would still hit with the standard defense, then the AP round just does standard damage.

For instance, the atlas had hardened armor, and a defense of 23.

I have an attack of 11 and am attacking with a 4 AP. If I roll a 12 or 13, I do (4-2) 2 damage, but if I roll a 14, the AP gets through and does 4 damage.

Assault mechs are some of the least appreciated units in this game, they DO need to be better. Might I remind you how fricken expensive the atlas is? This is a compromise, and takes into effect AP rounds hitting at an odd angle and doing less damage. In real life reactive armor can defeat AP, but I won't propose that measure because it would be too unbalancing.

Good point pryde, we all know the resounding success fasa had when they kept on introducing better technology for the mechs. Oh wait a minute, fasa went bankrupt. Well maybe you'll have a better point next time.