Firestorm over Gladius BETA (Closer to Tabletop 8th Edition)
Changes include unit costs and upkeep, unit sizes, unit stats, weapon stats, and etc. Costs are converted from a unit’s Power points.
This mod is currently a beta and fundamental changes that may break your save games will occur frequently!
Warning: This mod is still very much a WIP and tiny changes can break save-games. I apologize for this in advance but with the scope of things that need to be changed, we are still in the transitional phase of modernizing wargears, units, and abilities.
Load order:
FoG
Immersive Unit Scale
Whatever else you want as long as it does not change unit stats.
For more details on how conversions happen, see below:
The CRUNCH:
Cost and model count:
Costs and upkeep are based on power levels in the codex.
Power * 20 = Ingame cost and upkeep.
HP and Damage:
The damage tables in 8th changed which meant the damage/health ratio changed as well. It’s now effectively linear whereas before it was exponential.
Old formula: Every other toughness level wound was double the health.
Ex: If T4 W1 was 10HP, T6 W1 would be 20HP. T8 W1 would be 40.
This made sense due to the damage tables because having +2S over an opponent’s T would result in a 2+ to wound.
New formula: Everything is linear. Toughness * wounds = HP. In 8th, you’d only wound on a 2+ if you had double the strength compared to just +2S in 7th.
Templates and blasts:
Templates and blasts were removed in tabletop in favor of randomized number of attacks in 8th but I decided to keep them in this mod.
I see why they did this because it made games a lot faster for tabletop but it also destroyed a lot of the flavor in weapon profiles.
For example, a frag grenade is d6 attacks as well as a Battle Cannon when they used to be small blast and large blast.
Edit: HA! Blasts are back in 9th edition. Looks like even GW misses blast weapons.
Argument to remove templates:
It’s faithful to 8th!
Arguments to keep templates:
Without templates, Vindicators suddenly becomes the equivalent of d6 lascannon shots regardless of whether you’re shooting into 30 boyz or 1 Predator Tank. Loss of flavor and weapons become too similar.
This is just example but there are many others where a blast weapon cannot properly express its AoE nature because it became a d6 hits weapon.
Air Units:
Air units don’t get their damage reduction anymore. In 7th edition, all units had to snapfire at them unless you had skyfire. In 8th, they’re shot at like normal. Skyfire was also changed into +1BS vs Flyers, -1BS vs others. Technically skyfire itself was removed as a core rule but it’s effects are still there for former skyfire weapons like Hydra Autocannons in the codicies.
Mortal wounds:
I never liked the idea of mortal wounds because it also removed a lot of flavor from attacks. If a macro-cannon that could shoot space ships out of the sky had a strength, AP and damage value, why not Spore Mines?
There’s no easy way to convert mortal wounds to Gladius because everything has to translate to Hitpoints and 1 mortal wound on a T10 creature is not the same as one mortal wound on a T4.
Mortal wounds are currently modeled as S(2-10 depending on the roll required) D1 ignoring cover and armor. They additionally always reduce the HP of their target by 10%. There is no way to bypass invulnerable saves in Gladius currently.
Regeneration:
Due to wounds of different toughness being different values, most regeneration was scaled (or are being scaled as this mod is a WIP) to a % of max HP. For example, a Carnifex has 8 wounds. Its regeneration trait on tabletop regenerates 1 wound at the end of every turn or 1/8th of its max health. In Gladius, we ought to translate this to +12.5% HP a turn.
For simplicity, anything that heals 1 wound is equal to +10% HP since somethings have 8 wounds, some things have 11. In the future, we may spend some time to refine the details a bit more. It’s a difference of some deserving +12.5% while some deserve 9.09%.
TODO:
Change costs based on power to points (But this is very time consuming)
Rename a lot of things. A lot of identical weapons/rules got their names changed.
Rework special abilities/Traits. A lot of abilities are still 7th edition. Anything with a damage value were updated.
Isolate weapon effects into traits and discard traits that are no longer used.
8th lost a lot of flavorful traits but kept their effects in the weapon description. For example, Tesla is no longer a trait but all Tesla weapons still have the "Rolling a 6 to hit means you deal 3 attacks instead of 1".
Random small fixes here and there. Please throw a comment if you see one! Whether it’s something that’s not 8th or something not functioning correctly, it would be greatly appreciated.
Balance problems:
This mod is currently in a very rough state with everything transcribed from Table Top 8th Edition but this has some issues because we’re not playing on a table top. There are some mistranslations due to hex grid and game engine of Gladius. For example, on tabletop, you could rarely get more than 15 out of a 30 ork boyz mob to engage in close combat but every single ork boy is able to attack in Gladius (90 melee attacks + 30 pistol attacks!). Being able to stack attacks like that on tabletop would be every ork player’s spore dream.
There’s also an issue with hero sniping because Heroes occupy a single hex and look-out-sir doesn’t exist so when a giant mob of 30 guardsmen point their flashlight at a hero, that hero tends to vaporize.
