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I play with an Assualt heavy DoA style Blood Angels list, and recently me and my gaming partner (who plays a Tau army) have come across some ridiculous scenarios regarding the sweeping advance rule, for e.g.

The sanguinor assualts a 30 man unit of kroot, deals 5 wounds, 5 kroot are removed, kroot return attacks, don't cause any wounds. Kroot lose combat by 5 wounds, so take Ld test at -5 leadership and fail, then we role off for sweeping advance I win, sanguinor wipes out entire unit. This has happened against a whole host of his units, from fire warriors to crisis suits.

Massive advantage to me, which I'm not going to complain about but does make things rather one sided.

So we came up with the following rule, I'll describe it in an example.

5 man assualt squad, assualts a fire warrior team, all assualting takes place as normal, when the assualt is over, determine victor as normal, for this example we will say the fire warrior team lose the combat by 3 wounds and then fails the following Ld test, they then retreat 2D6 before the sweeping advance, and are placed the resulting distance away. The two units then test initiative against each other, if the attacker is succesful, they move back to BtB contact and the falling back unit immediatly suffers a number of wounds equal to the attacking or defending units models, which ever is greater. If this wipes out the unit then its wiped out, if the unit survives they are locked in combat for another turn.

Please tell me what you think on the proposed rule change?

As the attacker I would dislike that. For example, as a Tyranid player, this modification of Sweeping Advance makes it a lot harder to maintain Synapse, maintain some of the buffs that have a limited range, etc. It would also allow the defender to "steer" the combat into a kill zone to set up the attacking unit to be annihilated after the combat is finally over.

You do understand that the Sweeping Advance rules are not just the attackers killing all the fleeing models - it also represents the feeling units inability to regroup, and running for the hills no matter what happens on the battlefield.

Yeah I understand that, to be honest, this rule was designed with our games in mind, I have very little experience with 40K and have only played against Tau, so I'm not familiar with any of the other rules for armies. The sweeping advance as it is in the rule book works massively to my advantage, but just found this made the games a bit more interesting for us. Just thought I'd see how it would fair in the big wide world. Cheers for you input.



Also the falling back unit wouldn't be able to 'steer' the combat as the distance is randomly determined i.e. 2D6 and they have to fall back directly towards their own table edge via the shortest possible route??

randomly generated distance isn't always a bad thing.

Shortest possible route - so through terrain? What if enemy units are in the way? Do they have to stay in coherency? There's always ways to steer.

It'd be fine for a house rule, but don't forget it's not the actual rules if/when you fight other opponents
edit: also - if others join your group, you should re-evaluate the rule (like my Tyranid example, there are other armies that would be annoyed at the retreat/steering).

Yeah obviously we'd play the official rule outside of our games, and the retreat would be done to the wording in the rule book anyway, so we are not changing anything there that a unit couldn't do in retreat anyway.

rigeld's comments sum up the problems with your house rule well enough. I will say I understand why you're using it (and agree that it's appropriate for friendly games with your Tau friend). I frequently play Daemons against my roommate's CSM and I really hate the feeling of Sweeping one of his units. It just feels too easy to make that many models go poof.

Tau have that burden, being so terrible in cc, they're going to get swept a lot; tau players are better off learning how to avoid cc until they get a new codex. If you want to give him a handicap; Instead of a sweeping advance you could just make him suffer no retreat wounds.

I think the major problems with this are the 2D6 fallback and the awkward number of wounds. Just keep sweeping advance exactly as-is, but instead of removing the whole unit if they lose the initiative roll-off, take wounds equal to the number of attacks in the enemy unit, no armor saves, and leave any survivors in base to base to fight again next turn. If the retreating unit is wiped out, the winner consolidates as normal.

This way there's no "steering", no running out of Synapse range, and there's less chance of a sizable close combat unit like hormagaunts failing to wipe out their enemy in a sweep. They would probably have enough attacks to outnumber the survivors and sweep them as normal. This is definitely a house rule for you guys, to address the specific issue of one character or a very small unit completely wiping out a very large one. I don't think it's a change I would ever use, but more power to you!