Jeffro’s Car Wars Blog

Ramplates have been scaled back quite a bit in the new game. They get +1 or +2 damage per die instead of the old killer doubling, and the confetti rules put a limit on how much damage small cars can risk dealing out. (There should be no more 200 mph rams from heavily armored Compacts….)

Flame weapons have been scaled back a lot more, too– even more than ram weapons.

There was an old Van design in the original AADA guide called the Firestarter. All it had was a Heavy Laser in a 3-space turret. Under the variant fire rules first released in DCW (and subsequently made official in the Compendium), the HL was useless when it came to starting fires. It could only make a bad situation just a tad worse with it’s Mod of 1 and it’s Duration of 0.

The 5.0 fire rules brings the Firestarter back to the game allowing it to consistently score a fire marker with each hit. I think this is a good thing. On the other hand, I don’t like that the new Piranha with it’s three Incendiary MG’s is almost as good at starting fires as the Firestarter– and probably even better than the Hotshot!

The fire situation is further restricted by the fact that you now have to burn through the armor before you get a chance for explosion. Also, fires can go out fairly easily even on vehicles that don’t have extinguishers. This makes things unnecessarily hard on the Hotshot.

To balance all of this, I propose we give an additional bonus to flamethrowers. The Hotshot ought to have an edge here! When rolling at the end of the turn to see if the fire went out, add one to the roll for each hit that was scored by a flamethrower.

With this rule, the Hotshot has a much better chance of destroying his enemy with the “oven effect”– even if he doesn’t score fire markers every turn. A hit by a single FT will help insure that the fire keeps going. A hit by a pair of linked FT’s will most likely score one fire marker and then have a pretty good chance of earning a second one at the end of the turn.

This isn’t a big change and still doesn’t make flame weapons the terrors that they were back in Compendium 2.0. The main idea here is to keep the game colorful and lively by making the weapon types more equal and distinctive.