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Sweeping advance was also a method of differentiating between ranged and melee combat.

When you have a game where everyone can make attacks uncontested at a distance, getting into melee to do anything seems like a waste of effort.

Now that's a reality in the real world, but 40k retains melee as a standard battle tactic, so there has to be some advantage to doing it.


Sweeping advance gave you an incentive to get into combat with whatever is left of your units for a big payoff.

I'm not saying that the implementation is great, but the incentivisation aspect of the rule separated shooting and melee from one another and allowed them to be useful tactical decisions.

Treating melee like a harder to use form of ranged combat in a game where melee is expected makes it hard to use and unfun to attempt, unless you wombocombo something to try and push one uber unit into melee with all the gotcha rules the game currently uses.








Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Tyran wrote:
The problem with Sweeping Advance is the same as the rest of all the morale related mechanics, pretty much everyone except Imperial Guard and Tau ignored it.

this is where how you describe it and implement it has a big effect. When the rules are written using language that plays into things like fearlessness etc, you can't justify using it. But if you use different terminology and applications, it can apply to everyone.

IE, you could determine who won combat like normal, make a battleshock test and if the side failed, the opposing side gets another round of combat against them (no further test).

You can call it 'Overwhelm' - no matter how heroic your dude is, he will get overwhelmed by superior numbers eventually. We see it in every epic last stand. Psychology doesn't play into it.

Or any of a dozen other resolution methods.

The pendulum can go too far.

I’m by no means saying any edition got it right, but 3rd Ed most definitely got it wrong.

When many combat oriented codexes could get you into combat by turn 2, and so reliably? It became not much fun if your army favoured range.

Because once you’re stuck in? You get to do damage twice as often as a shooty unit. On account you get to fight in both player turns.

If you’re only making combat around turn 3, or with the odd unit in turn 2? That’s not so bad. But when the majority of your force is kicking my teeth down my throat before my gun barrels are even warm? It’s A Problem.

There is also the issue of scoring, and that in the current progressive scoring system melee is just better at taking objectives.

And I vastly prefer progressive scoring over the previous end game scoring.

BanjoJohn wrote:
I like 3rd edition combat sequence for units, but I think that 2nd edition combat is really fun for character vs character duels, it just needs a few adjustments, the current edition where its like... a set "to hit" for attacks is just dumb, like... two units with a 2+ to hit going against each other? they're so bad-ass at combat that they are bad at defending themselves from being hit in combat? WS vs WS and check a table is better.

Yeah, I was forced to vote 3rd-7th because 1st-2nd is too granular, and I don't agree with fixed rolls in comparison to some sort of relative check.

Mad Doc Grotsnik wrote:The pendulum can go too far.

I’m by no means saying any edition got it right, but 3rd Ed most definitely got it wrong.

When many combat oriented codexes could get you into combat by turn 2, and so reliably? It became not much fun if your army favoured range.

Because once you’re stuck in? You get to do damage twice as often as a shooty unit. On account you get to fight in both player turns.

If you’re only making combat around turn 3, or with the odd unit in turn 2? That’s not so bad. But when the majority of your force is kicking my teeth down my throat before my gun barrels are even warm? It’s A Problem.

Not sure I follow. you can alpha strike your enemy at range from turn 1, why is melee doing it in turn 2 somehow unforgiveable? In 40k there's no intrinsic reason why melee has to be inferior in use to shooting, only different. There are entire armies built around the identity of melee, so it seems strange to want their method of winning games to be intrinsically worse than shooting armies.

The fighting twice aspect goes both ways though, it's not like melee armies are the only ones that benefit from that. And with the current game rules removing initiative, you don't even have that to advantage the melee armies.

Tyran wrote:There is also the issue of scoring, and that in the current progressive scoring system melee is just better at taking objectives.

And I vastly prefer progressive scoring over the previous end game scoring.

I'm the opposite, but then I'm more interested in simulationist gaming I've come to realise. I'm not a big fan of rules that are so abstract they don't really reflect how the battlefield actually works, even if it is a balanced mechanism for the game. You can sit on something for a decade and still lose to a single blitzkrieg, so I don't really see standing on something for a protracted period of time as a particularly fulfilling game experience. I just personally find it really bland.