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They are already technically assault vehicles, but they really oughta make it so you can opt out of shooting in order to charge from them, such as vangaurds would do.

(pg 82)
Passengers Charging from Open-Topped Transports
Acting as an ideal attack platform, all open-topped Transports are Assault Vehicles.


(pg 33)
Assault Vehicle
Passengers disembarking from Access Points on a vehicle with this special rule can charge on the turn they do so, even on a turn that the vehicle was destroyed.


I wish they'd My assault marines are mad that they can lose packs and take a pod for (free and) seemingly no reason.

No, they're fine as they are.

Yeah this really doesn't work. GW are really moving away from sudden, unstoppable assaults (Assaulting from Outflank, Scout etc.) and the few that remain are both extremely rare, and very expensive.

Imagine a Drop Pod-based Space Wolf army. On turn 1, you could see 4-5 Pods slam down without any risk of Mishap or losing squads. Then every one of them disgorges a Dreadnought or pack of Blood Claws into your face with no tactical thought required, no response permitted and absolutely nothing the other player can do to defend against it besides bubblewrap or 'Deal with it'.

Drop Pod armies are already playable and have their fair share of good/bad matchups. This change would change them to rock/paper/scissors, where you are a rock and a lot of armies just became scissors.

I say no for one reason. It has none of the risks of other assault armies. Chaos Daemons? If they deepstrike on other models, they go bye bye. Also daemons cannot assault out of the warp even though they do absolutely nothing without being in cc half the time (plaguebearers can squat objectives tzeentch can shot magic), Tyranids have few units that can auto-assault the one I know of hides in 1 building which means the enemy can go in all of them except for yours.

Drop pods? They removed the majority of deepstriking fears. Go ahead. Deepstrike right in front of your enemy. If you accidentally hit cover or anything it will just slide away from it. And then you can assault.

I'll admit, assaulting isn't as good as shooting. And vanguards aren't good either. However, assaults out of deepstrike are a hard one to balance. With it, your unit might be able to kill a single unit before being swamped (and interceptor still exists). But drop pods remove the biggest weakness of being deepstruck.

I gotta agree with the guys on this one...

We played the Badab Campaign and it allows for the Luscius pattern Drop Pod-- Its for dreads and allows Assaulting on the same turn as arrival.

IT WAS DEVASTATING -- EVERY TIME!!

Drop pod armies are good enough-- to allow assault on drop would be jsut TOO much..

Mozzamanx wrote:

Imagine a Drop Pod-based Space Wolf army. On turn 1, you could see 4-5 Pods slam down without any risk of Mishap or losing squads. Then every one of them disgorges a Dreadnought or pack of Blood Claws into your face with no tactical thought required, no response permitted and absolutely nothing the other player can do to defend against it besides bubblewrap or 'Deal with it'.

Imagine a Drop Pod-based Space Wolf army. On turn 1, you could see 4-5 Pods slam down without any risk of Mishap or losing squads. Then every one of them disgorges a Dreadnought or pack of Grey Hunters into your face with no tactical thought required, no response permitted and absolutely nothing the other player can do to defend against it besides bubblewrap or 'Deal with it'.

I don't see much difference between being able to drop squads with no risk at your doorstep to shoot the **** out of you and dropping squads to assault you. Neither let you respond or do anything to counter it.

No, but a single shooting phase is almost always weaker than the same points invested in a combat unit. When you can deliver a squad to optimum range and unleash a single turn of carnage, doing so via assault will almost always result in more damage.

I can't imagine many units doing this better than Wolfguard, for example. A unit of 10 with Combi-Plasmas plus a Pod, still comes under 300pts. They will get a single turn of glory and on a good day, will kill 10 other models. Assuming they can target a unit without any cover.
A similar investment would alternatively get you ~8 Terminators, who on the assault would obtain a similar amount of damage except they do it every turn, are wearing Terminator armour, and can Sweep the enemy.

The difference between a single, unstoppable shooting phase, and a guaranteed assault charge, are completely different things. The assault will almost always inflict more damage for the same investment because it is harder to assault, and so it is made devastating to make it rewarding. If you remove all the difficulty while keeping the power the same, all you need to do is swamp the deployment zone with Podded-combat specialists and achieve a turn-2 tabling.

I'd say that the shooting phase is becoming more and more capable of ripping apart the enemy before they get in range. Especially since I've seen assault armies neer advance simply because too many of them die. I agree that assault can be more devestating, but sadly the game's combat system doesn't really make that favorable. No matter how low the enemies WS is, you will only hit on 3+ and the WS required to make them hit on a 5+ is double their ws+1. To make matters worse, even furious charge doesn't give you that +1 I edge that mimimized your wounds. Nowadays, more and more assault units get ripped apart simply because they hit at the same time (or slower) than the enemy.

Then, to stab a nail in the coffin. Sweeping really doesn't make much of a difference. Space Marine armies don't care two flips for it, CSM lists either use cheap and worthless expendable cultists or opt for fearless blobs and heavy weapons/fast weapons of doom. Necrons have a resounding leadership of 10, IG can get stubborn and re-roll leadership very easily (although admittedly they are more prone to sweeping), and Tau armies lack high leadership but make up by usually keeping small elite groups or shove an etherial that buffs everybody around him to Ld10. Then orks 11+ get fearless, tyranids get fearless by MCs with synapse, DE can get fearless by killing enough (granted they do have to kill enough), etc....

My apologies. I just can never see the point in sweeping. It rarely happens and rarely means much of anything. My real big gripe is it is an assault that has pretty much no risks in an edition that has risks galore for assault from random charge distance to overwatch to a million other problems. And letting the assaulter be as brazen as he wishes to be because he can deepstrike almost anywhere without fear? From an assault army (Daemon player that really likes Nids, Orks, and has watched an assault oriented DE army fight tau), that is grating and only acceptable if it costs a hefty sum.

I'm in favor of assaulting drop pods. the introduction of overwatch in 6th edition does mitigate some of the reason that previous editions didn't let them be assault vehicles, which according to the fluff, that's the sole reason for them.
if they were to be introduced as assault vehicles, there would need to be several other balancing factors
1. they are av 10 with 2 hull points, or av 12 with 1 hull point
2. remove the "no mishap" rule
3. more proliferation of the "interceptor" special rule

choose 2 of any of those and i'd say it's balanced.

This has been part of my suggested changes for Sword Brethren for quite a while. I'd probably limit it to some units such as Vanguard Vets and their equivalents, but non-Chaos/SW assaulty MEQ really need some way to get some stuff into combat fast.

My apologies... but I'm curious. You mentioned non-chaos assaulty meq getting into CC as though CSM have a way to effectively get into CC. Now, perhaps I'm a fool and messing up on something but, at least that I know of, we don't really have many things. In fact, the only effective tactic I know if is spawn (and occasionally swap this out for bikers) protecting either a nurgle lord or a Khornate lord with an axe of fury and the daemon prince with wings (that suffers from being blatantly out of place in most player armies). Bar these two units, we don't have much.

Berzerkers? Not really worth it frankly. The only Land Raider we get has space for only 10 guys and costs a fortune. If not that, then you shove them in multiple rhinos which is just as reliable as any other assaulty unit.

Drop pods are hard.... I just.... I'm caught at an impasse. Vanguard are truly terrible yet they need something to make them work. BA and BT (and heck toss in all the assault leaning MEQ) armies really do need a reliable way to get into cc that doesn't cost a fortune. It's a hard one which sadly will likely take until the next edition comes out or codices are updates

Chaos does indeed have the Juggerlord and flying Daemon Princes. Chaos Bikes are generally superior to loyalists as well. Space Wolves have Thunderwolf Cavalry that fill the same role. In theory Templars can be faster, but it relies on rolling good for RZ, having the enemy shoot you in the first place and not losing too many models in the direction you want to travel. Even then, the Templar blobs don't hit as hard in CC as an *insert unit* with Daemon Weapon.

Pardon the self-plugs, but the other half of my Sword Brethren improvement was letting them consolidate into combat once per turn. With the reduced reliability of assaults and the addition of Overwatch assaults really need to step up the damage potential to be able to match shooting.

Oh and I concur on the dispraportionate imbalance of it. The only reason I questioned was primarily due to... berzerkers being worse at cc arguably than plague marines . It's very understandable, especially from a common Black Templar army. Really, the only army that can seem to truly due assault well is daemons. Even then they have some duds and some meh/situational units. I think the real problem is that whilst bikers, beasts, and cavalry can do assault very well, other armies struggle that lack these or their units aren't fast enough to make up for all of the buffs to shooting and nerfs to cc.

Good luck balancing it!

Well, I can only agree. Berzerkers should be Death Company on steroids, not Black Templars from 2 editions ago with WS5.

I´d rather like drop pods to be able to tank shock or make template hits with s4 ap- when they hit an enemy. That would be great