Rules in the Age of Darkness: How vehicles work

It was a rare battlefield of the Horus Heresy that didn’t shake to the grinding treads of tanks and the crashing mechanical footfalls of knights and titans.

Vehicles work differently to infantry in the Horus Heresy, where they have different types of stats and other rules unique to them. For existing players this will be reassuringly familiar, but there are a few key changes in the new edition that are worth casting our explorator augury web over.

Vehicles in the Age of Darkness

Tanks, knights, and titans are all sub-types of vehicles, and therefore use a different statline to your footslogging troops. Some models that might seem quite vehicle-y, meanwhile, including Dreadnoughts, are treated as bigger, more resilient infantry, so they don’t get the different statline.

For example, the most common kind of vehicle – the  tank – retains the Movement and Ballistic Skill characteristics, but the other stats are now replaced with Armour Values that govern its front, sides, and rear arcs. The Wounds statistic is also replaced with the more vehicle-appropriate Hull Points, in a system that will be familiar to current players.

When they are shot at, the attacker must first determine which part of the vehicle they’re shooting at – whether it's the front, where the armour is usually strongest, the sides or the rear. 

If the attacker hits with their shot, there aren’t wound and save rolls to determine damage. Instead the attacker makes an Armour Penetration test by rolling a D6 and adding their Ranged Strength (RS). 

Fail to match the target’s Armour Value in that area, and the shot simply plinks off.* If you manage to equal the total you score a Glancing Hit, while exceeding the Armour Value results in a Penetrating Hit.

What’s new?

Unlike in previous editions however, Glancing Hits don’t automatically strike off a Hull Point. Instead, you get to roll on a table to inflict a random Tactical Status: Impaired Sensors for Stunned, Broken Motors for Pinned and Weapons Damaged for Suppressed. 

And unlike infantry, who can test on their fancy new characteristics to remove a status, vehicles must make Repair tests in the Status Sub-phase or be repaired by specialists like Techmarines. If they get hit with the same penalty again, they then lose a single Hull Point. 

Penetrating Hits simply deal the weapon’s Damage value straight to the Hull Points, and a vehicle is destroyed when this total reaches zero. To make sure that tanks aren’t blowing up too quickly in this new era of multi-Damage weapons, they’ve also had their Hull Points bumped up across the board – the Predator, for instance, goes from three to five.

This does mean that the old Vehicle Damage Chart is no more, but it lives on in spirit as much of its functionality – such as reducing accuracy and impairing movement – has moved to the Glancing Hits table. Vehicles are now more durable in general and less prone to inopportune critical hits.

Knights and Titans

These war engines use similar rules, albeit with a few twists. Knights are far more capable of fighting in close combat and often have gigantic melee weapons, so they also retain Weapon Skill, Strength, Initiative, and Attacks characteristics, while their greater ability to react to incoming fire means they only have Front and Rear Armour Facings. 

Titans, on the other hand, operate very differently, and there is an entire chapter of the Liber Questoris book dedicated to them. Rather than having various Armour Facings like tanks, they have several locations with their own Armour Values and Hull Points that can be independently targeted.

Reducing the Hull Points of a location to zero doesn’t outright destroy a Titan, but rather cripples that location, causing further attacks to roll against a lower armour value and cause devastating internal damage. Rolling on the Titan Critical Damage Table might result in the loss of an entire weapon, collapsing to the ground, or even mortally wounding the Princeps, while a particular stroke of fortune can detonate its reactor in spectacular fashion.

We can’t go into all the Titan rules here, but the changes come together to make their deployment a real event for players and an exciting challenge to overcome. Such majestic engines of war are gradually chipped away as they thunder across the battlefield, fighting on through damage that would crater lesser vehicles before emerging victorious or slowly, mournfully falling amidst the ruins of their foes.

We’ll leave you here for now, but there’s still a lot more to see – including a new system for Flyer Combat Assignments that makes Aircraft more engaging and interactive. There’s actually a whole system for infantry assaults against Titans, in which valiant troops climb all over the enormous war machines and desperately probe for weaknesses while the crew fight them off! You can even dispatch jump-pack equipped Space Marines to attack the head in close combat…

Join us again next week as we find out more about the stars of the upcoming boxed set – the awesome Saturnine Terminators and Dreadnought – and have a first look at the kits that build them.

* You may be thinking “Does this mean that some weapons are fundamentally unable to harm Vehicles?” and yes, it does.