It's time for another preview blog from Warlord Games for Bolt Action: Third Edition – this week, we're looking at vehicles!

We’re elbow-deep in Bolt Action hype in the run-up to the September’s launch of the new edition of the world’s best WWII wargame, and we’ve been polling our online communities to find out what you want to know about the upcoming changes. This week, we’re looking at a big subject – vehicles! Strap in – we’re going to cover a lot of ground today!

We’ve already dropped a few bits of important information about how vehicles are going to work in 3rd Ed., with regards their machine guns (find out more here) and anti-tank guns (read about those here), but today is mostly a look at vehicles themselves – we’re going to cover three big topics in this article: vehicles and damage, transport vehicles and how they interact with the game, and a look at vehicle points costs.

A photo of fully painted miniature figures and terrain for wargaming: two tanks rolling through a desert oasis

Vehicles and Damage

So, without further ado – vehicles and damage! We’ll start with the easiest and simplest bit, which has nevertheless been a source of some confusion throughout Second Edition – soft-skin (aka unarmoured) vehicles.

A photo of a fully painted miniature figure of a WW2 jeep with a mounted machine gun and its crew

When you score a hit against a vehicle, you’ll see that it has a damage value, just like an infantry unit – nothing’s changed there! For soft-skin vehicles, that damage value is still 6+, and if you can roll that six, the vehicle is destroyed – no need to roll on any damage tables! Lightweight sheet metal and canvas are historically not very bulletproof, so it’s entirely possible (and indeed, quite effective) to simply riddle a soft-skin vehicle with small arms fire until you roll that one six and it goes ‘boom’! If you hit it with a weapon with a high penetration value, it’ll get even easier, so make sure to keep your jeeps and trucks out of harm’s way, unless you want to find yourself the proud owner of a well-stocked scrapyard!

For armoured vehicles, it’s a little bit different. Designed specifically to resist differing levels of enemy fire, armoured vehicles have a damage value of 7+ or more – this means that they cannot be destroyed by small arms (weapons without a penetration value), which means you’ll need to break out the big guns! Two kinds of damage are possible against armoured vehicles – superficial, and full. Superficial damage occurs when a ‘glancing’ hit is scored – mechanically, this means your damage roll was equal to the damage value of the vehicle. In Second Edition, if you scored superficial damage you would roll on the single damage table and apply a modifier to the result – no longer! For Third Edition, we’ve split damage into two tables: let’s have a look at the superficial damage table to start!

The Superficial Damage Results on Armoured Vehicles Table from Bolt Action: Third Edition, showing the various range of possibilities for each result on a six-sided dice

We can see that this table contains results that will degrade the performance of your vehicle, rather than destroy it outright, representing incoming fire striking something important, but not necessarily fatal. If these hits build up, you’ll find yourself with a vehicle that’s much, much less effective on the table, or even knocked out altogether! You’ll also notice that the top result on this table – On Fire – can also disable a vehicle right away, representing a very lucky (or unlucky, depending on your perspective!) shot.

But what if you manage to roll higher than the vehicle’s damage value? Well, then you’ve penetrated the armour, and you’ll roll on the full damage table!

The Full Damage Results on Armoured Vehicles Table from Bolt Action: Third Edition, showing the various possibilities for each result on a six-sided dice

Here’s where it starts getting nasty – get through the armour, and you’ve got a 50% chance of destroying the vehicle outright with no further rolling needed! With the new platoon selector system allowing for more vehicles, this makes it well worth stocking up on some decent anti-tank weaponry to reduce them to scrap metal!

Transport Vehicles

Next up is transport vehicles. On the face of it, they’re really simple – big boxes on wheels (or tracks, or both!) full of soldiers – providing your infantry a great deal of tactical mobility. What they’re not, however, is designed to be right in the thick of fighting! When the shooting starts, transport vehicles have a rather sensible habit of making themselves scarce, particularly if the enemy get too close.

An extract from Bolt Action: Third Edition titled "TRANSPORT VEHICLES" next to a photo of a fully painted miniature of a WW2 truck filled with soldiers

What we can see here is one rule that remains the same from Second Edition (unarmoured transports being destroyed by enemy proximity), and one big change – armoured transports have a much better chance of sticking around, as they would often be designed to get their troops into the combat area and provide limited fire support, and were built to resist small-arms fire in doing so. This means that your half-tracks just got that much more survivable, although of course with their relatively light armour they’re still very vulnerable to anti-armour fire!

Vehicle Points Costs

Lastly, let’s have a brief talk about points costs. One of the things that was regularly fed back in Second Edition was that certain vehicles cost too many points to be regularly fielded – particularly the very large ones! The vehicle points costing system has been completely revamped and overhauled, and you can expect to see some of these vehicles getting cheaper to bring across the board. Naturally, however, big tanks remain a big outlay – let’s look at the legendary (and very, very large) Tiger II! In Second Edition, this absolute monster would run you a tidy 666 points if you wanted to bring it as a Veteran. In the new edition, the same Veteran tank is down to a ‘modest’ 528 – a reduction of 138 points! There have been other changes, too – turretless assault guns will now have their points reflect their relative lack of capability compared to their turreted cousins, while some vehicles that were widely regarded as far too ‘cheap’ have had their costs adjusted upwards – it’s a change across the board!

The stats for a Panzer VI Tiger II tank from Bolt Action: Third Edition alongside a fully painted miniature

Of course, these aren’t all the changes to vehicles you can expect to see in Bolt Action: Third Edition. Some we’ll talk about in upcoming Intelligence Reports, but for others… you’ll just have to wait until September!

Bolt Action: Third Edition is out this September. Pre-order now.

Check out the official miniatures from Warlord Games on their website – complete with special bundles and pre-order exclusive deals.

And watch this space for more preview blogs coming soon.