Explosive weapon travel time
Posted: Sat Oct 29, 2022 9:41 pm
Me and my friend just got into a 10 minute long argument over how fast explosive weapon travel speeds should be to prevent them from becoming useless after a few dozen inches against anything fast enough to get out of the way.
The rulebook currently has explosive weapons travel at a fixed rate of 12 inches per turn, regardless of explosive size, whether there's anything actively propelling the explosive like a rocket motor or external interference, or whether the projectile is guided or not.
For instance, my friend decided to fire a Size 3" mortar (12" range, but our houserule gives ranged weapons 3x the range they'd have without the rule, giving 36" range) at my hero (7" move, plus 1d10 sprint) at maximum range. Even if the mortar shells were Xs3 and not Xs1, there would still be an inch to spare when escaping the blast radius, assuming I stayed stationary the entire time and let my hero be shelled the entire game. If it was a normal infantry squad with only 5" move and 1d6 sprint, outrunning the mortar shell would be laughably easy.
From what I can tell, explosive weapons were balanced as strictly anti-structure weapons past 12 inches, whether the explosive launcher is a 2" man portable mortar or a 10" artillery bunker buster, seeing as almost all structures have a move stat of 2".
It looks like the only other option for delivering explosive payloads is a Launcher (range wsx6", use ws+2", max payload size=half wsize) which presumably also suffers from payload velocity issues, so at that point you might as well use regular guns, which have 2 extra inches of range compared to a cannon of equivalent size and the ability to hit instantly at the cost of reduced damage and no arc fire (but you'll get a lot more damage dice that hit since they can't be evaded without failing the action roll), and even if your enemy forgets to move units away from the target area, there's still the chance of missing due to an action roll.
Maybe payload launchers could be buffed to have additional velocity scaling with weapon size, so anything reasonably fast with a sufficiently long ranged weapon can't kite artillery without fear of retaliation after taking out non-payload weapons.
The rulebook currently has explosive weapons travel at a fixed rate of 12 inches per turn, regardless of explosive size, whether there's anything actively propelling the explosive like a rocket motor or external interference, or whether the projectile is guided or not.
For instance, my friend decided to fire a Size 3" mortar (12" range, but our houserule gives ranged weapons 3x the range they'd have without the rule, giving 36" range) at my hero (7" move, plus 1d10 sprint) at maximum range. Even if the mortar shells were Xs3 and not Xs1, there would still be an inch to spare when escaping the blast radius, assuming I stayed stationary the entire time and let my hero be shelled the entire game. If it was a normal infantry squad with only 5" move and 1d6 sprint, outrunning the mortar shell would be laughably easy.
From what I can tell, explosive weapons were balanced as strictly anti-structure weapons past 12 inches, whether the explosive launcher is a 2" man portable mortar or a 10" artillery bunker buster, seeing as almost all structures have a move stat of 2".
It looks like the only other option for delivering explosive payloads is a Launcher (range wsx6", use ws+2", max payload size=half wsize) which presumably also suffers from payload velocity issues, so at that point you might as well use regular guns, which have 2 extra inches of range compared to a cannon of equivalent size and the ability to hit instantly at the cost of reduced damage and no arc fire (but you'll get a lot more damage dice that hit since they can't be evaded without failing the action roll), and even if your enemy forgets to move units away from the target area, there's still the chance of missing due to an action roll.
Maybe payload launchers could be buffed to have additional velocity scaling with weapon size, so anything reasonably fast with a sufficiently long ranged weapon can't kite artillery without fear of retaliation after taking out non-payload weapons.