kill dem stunties wrote:juraigamer wrote:You can always move your models in a manner that makes the smallest amount of units actually fight the first round of combat, forcing mass consolidation and resolution for the next player assault round.
You've obviously misunderstood him, as what he said is entirely legal. In the preceeding movement and running (if fleet) phases you string your 10 banshes out max coherency so that only 3-4 will be able to make it inside base contact or within 2" of a model in base with their 6" assault move, its very easily to accomplish with a bit of firesight and a decent run roll.
What he said is not entirely legal. You can make regular moves and fleet moves how you want, but not assault moves. If someone says 'you can always move', that would cover movement in all phases, not just the movement phase. You've even mentioned fleet movement, so you're obviously aware that some movement doesn't occur during the regular movement phase, and clearly are including it in the dicsussion. You can choose to move your models in a particular manner during the movement phase and with fleet movements, but not always, and it was the 'always move' that I objected to.
Maybe your battlefields are different than mine, since I know a lot of batreps feature tables with almost no terrain, but the positioning is hard to pull off on battlefields that I see. If the squad is in terrain, you either get more models into combat than you want or fail to charge depending on the difficult terrain roll, same thing if any of the banshees end up in terrain. My
tac squads typically set up in cover or in a rhino, which becomes difficult terrain when cracked, and most marine players that I see either do the same or play
HtH chapters (who you don't want to string out against, especially wolves).
Also, 10 tac marines fighting back in combat doesnt really scare anyone .... let alone sweep squads of anything but .... gretchin? mabye?
10
tac marines fighting back in combat will beat 3 banshees around 1/4 of the time, though I don't feel like slogging through the whole math. 10
tac marines get 12 attacks that hit on 1/2, wound on 2/3, pen armor on 1/2, while 3 banshees get 12 attacks that hit on 1/2, wound on 1/3, pen armor 1/1. The banshees average 2 wounds and the marines average 1, but the problem for the banshees is that you're not rolling enough dice to expect a consistent result. It is very possible fail 12 rolls of a 4+ then a 5+, and very possible to get more than 1 wound from 13 attacks on a 4+ 3+ 4+. If the marines get a little lucky and the banshees get unlucky, you just lost the fight despite having a better unit.
Plus, since we're talking about vanilla marines and not one of the
HtH oriented chapters, if you only win by 1-2 wounds, then the
tac squad can choose to fail it's morale check. While you catch him 13/18 times, that only gives him 1-2 additional armor saves which is no big deal when he's probably going to die anyway, and 5/18 times he will win the initiative roll and escape, leaving you stuck in the open and the squad alive.
You can believe that it's impossible to whiff with 3 banshees against marines, or for a full squad of marines to do 2-3 casualties to a T3 unit, but it's really not hard to roll 6 dice and get no 5s or 6s. You can gamble on the squad never escaping after narrowly losing the combat, but they can slip away just under 1/3 of the time. It sounds to me like you might be one of those guys that thinks of a 70% chance as a sure thing and believes the dice are against him when things don't work out, but if bank on getting a decent run roll, followed by not whiffing on 3 banshees attacking, followed by marines not making a 1/3 chance to escape, then it's not really bad luck when you fail occasionally. Just stringing the chances together here gives you around a 1/6 chance to get stuck out in the open without killing the marine squad, and banking a whole squad vs squad action on the equivalent of a single terminator save is really pretty chancy.
