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Like the topic says, does a pure melee army need more skill than an army with more phases? Imo if you have more phases like movement, psycic, shooting and melee that requires more skills then just move and hope for good advance/charges. What do you think?

I don't think skill comes into it. It's more balancing your army.

You need at least some form of shooting to balance your army and distract your opponent. Otherwise those combat units are going to get decimated.

I have my Az castle. 10 Hellblasters with Lieutenant and ancient.

Say I'm playing against Blood Angels.

My opponent has 2 squad of Death company one 15 man and one 10 man. without my opponent having much else I can just waster 12 plasma shot into one unit and 8 into the other. That will waste and they have wasted points and men.

If my opponent has some devs and a deredeo dread for example, they can then keep the Death company in deepstrike away from shots due to more models on table, and i then have to try and get in range of a Deredeo.

I don;t think it's skill, I think it's more you mix up your list to create balance.

Yes and no?

I think an all melee army is easier to play poorly. Just charge forward until you reach your foe, chop him to pieces, repeat. You can ignore large swaths of the rules, as you don’t use them.

But due to the nature of the game, if you want to be successful with a melee army, you need to know all the subtleties of the rules. Shooting is generally stronger, psychic powers can be game changers, etc. You need to know the ins and outs of all these things if you want to win. Going pure melee is hamstringing yourself by limiting options. To pull off a win you are going to have to be a better player.

Ixeon wrote:
Like the topic says, does a pure melee army need more skill than an army with more phases? Imo if you have more phases like movement, psycic, shooting and melee that requires more skills then just move and hope for good advance/charges. What do you think?

This is such a one dimensional way of looking by at things, "whoever has the most phases takes the most skill". One of the most iconic highskill armies back in the day was Dark Eldar Venomspam, which was basically an army that did nothing but move + shoot, yet it took careful positioning, smart target priority, understanding of every other army's threat ranges, and careful judgement combined with strong use of their superior mobility to a achieve all these.

Plus most melee armies are shooting and using powers anyway to some extent.

So to answer your question, no. Not because they are easier or anything, but simply for the fact that it's willful stupidity to just paint broad strokes for any style of play like this, as opposed to taking a nuanced look at individual armies.

I hope this thread doesn't go any further than this post because honestly, anyone saying you can make sweeping generalisations like this with any degree of accuracy concerning 40k, is just talking out of bias and salt.

I think it requires a much better understanding or the movement and charge / fight phases.

A melee army that understands how to engulf and clear out chaff quickly then use their Pile-In and Consolidation moves to touch the big guns behind etc definitely takes more "skill" when you use the definition that skill applying the right technique at the right time.

Take the Nurgle vs Imperium game on Warhammer TV over the weekend - the Nurgle player appeared to have a much better understanding of their game than the Imperial player did

- They constantly used their Fall Back move from combats with Plague Bearers vs Custodes units to surrounded the Imperials and deny them more Fight Phases to kill the Daemons, whilst also ensuring they couldn't go anywhere else but Charge the same unit again and again;

- Used their movement to much better effect, Piling In and Consolidating towards the nearby Vexilla and destroying the Relic he was guarding the process for D3 Victory Points;

- Tied up the Shield Captain on the last turn with a PBC purely to prevent the Shield Captain being able to Charge the last group of Plague Bearers on a "home" relic.

All of these things are "skill" that melee players will learn to use game after game, and a "gun-line" player will probably be aware of but might not be able to apply consistently across the game more readily.

Ultimately though you're at such a disadvantage the "luck" element is a much larger factor. You're so much more reliant on:

1) Getting the first turn
2) Proper terrain for LoS up the table
3) Good rolls on your behalf (advance, charge and saves)
4) Poor rolls / decision on your opponents behalf

That the skill element is lost quite quickly and you're more at the mercy of your opponent / dice rolls until you can implement your overall strategy.

Ixeon wrote:
Like the topic says, does a pure melee army need more skill than an army with more phases? Imo if you have more phases like movement, psycic, shooting and melee that requires more skills then just move and hope for good advance/charges. What do you think?

Assault in general requires much more micro than shooting, and much more decision making.

Shooting requires you to choose targets and roll dice - getting shot arguably requires more decisions than shooting when you're deciding which models to remove for maximum effect.

Assault has a lot more decision points.

1) who do I declare as a target of my charge?

2) How do I use my charge move? (note that this requires additional thought because which enemy model is closest to each of your models affecting pile-in)

3) Which models to I select to fight first (planning around interrupt stratagems)

4) how do I use my pile-in? Do I attempt to loop in other units that will get to hit me just to tie them up? Have I declared additional charge targets I get to pile into and attack? Can I surround one or more enemy models to prevent a fallback?

5) Which weapons do I fight with first? This frequently matters because smart assault defense micro can involve strategically removing models in order to prevent models that haven't fought equipped with different weapons from having a target, since models pile in as a whole unit, but fight individually one weapon at a time.

6) Same as 4), how can I use my consolidation to gain an additional advantage?

the assault phase has a LOT of moving parts and complexity compared to shooting. This isn't to say you can't make assault brainless - bring enough ork boyz, and you're basically just pushing walls of models around, but it still takes far more thought to run those ork boyz than it would a pure tau gunline. TAC armies with a mix of everything do generally require a good amount of tactics, but in order for assault to really matter at all, you'll need a lot of it, Ive found about 50% of the list is where assault becomes at all worth investing in.

Its also worth mentioning that with multi-phase armies you have more time and options to cover your mistakes, so the learning curve is a lot shallower.

Didn't quite kill THAT unit with your Smites? You still have your shooting and fight phases to go.

Slightly out of position now? If you have a good raged firebase you can still have some impact on the game.

When you go melee, you only have 1 phase and you really have to make that phase work. If it doesn't work, you get rubber lances or find yourself out positioned then your opponent has a whole 3-4 effective phases to punish you.

This is all just my experience having gone from a pure Khorne list (World Eaters + Daemons) to Aeldari Craftworlds (Alaitoc). My Alaitoc list is a lot easier to play and far more forgiving on me as a player - I prefer the WE army though and wish it was more effective.

I would say that Melee Armies take more skill to play than shooty armies.

Having played both, they each have their unique challenges, but the weirdness of the 40k rules is that assault is much more intense with individual model movement. So, for example, being able to encircle a single enemy model between pile-in and consolidate moves is important, because then they can't fall back. This means you can't just come wheeling across the board, because you may have to stop .9" away from the enemy, then use 3 inches of movement to walk around behind them and end .5" away, then swing, then use another 3" of movement to trap the models that didn't die and end up .1" away.

This is why melee "feels" less good than shooting; you absolutely have to play incredibly tightly to get melee to work right.

IMHO, though, this is a good thing, as Melee is the only way in the game to completely shut down enemy units short of outright killing them, and this works on enemy Melee as well. For example, last game I sought to keep a Baneblade alive near a Space Wolf Dreadnought. I charged said dreadnought with some Skitarii in my turn, knowing that it could not charge the Baneblade in his turn and giving it a chance to get away. However, I had to ensure the Dreadnought could not fall back (to chase and attempt to keep up with the Baneblade) or wipe the Skitarii - so I used far more models than he had attacks (I think it had 5?) and charged to .9" away, using the remaining 6" of movement in the Fight phase to completely surround him with a double layer or so of bodies. This meant that the Dreadnought couldn't fall back to chase the Baneblade, meaning I could make my full move away from the enemy twice before he got out of combat (after his next turn, at the end of which he'd finish off the Skitarii and consolidate, for another full move away before he could charge again). That bought my Baneblade 20" of space.

So while Melee takes more skill, it's also far more devastating - ten or so Skitarii in melee shut down a Dreadnought long enough that my tank got hopelessly far away from it, at almost no cost to me. Melee can shut down entire armies or units save for the very most powerful or rare, if it's used super well. So it better to be hard to use, because it can be scarily strong.

Well, Alaitoc is OP and WE are not - according to current concensus.

I'd have to agree that if a style of army were hardest, it'd be combined arms. Yes, you can clean up your mistakes. However, same can be said for CC or Shooty. How much of a mistake you can recover from is the same-ish. The combined arms army can charge what it doesn't kill, but that's not free. They are not likely to kill with just Shooty, and need to finish with the CC. The combined arms army needs to know and decide everything the shooty or CC army needs to, but lacks the overwhelming power in either of those phases, and needs to know and perform in both.

There are variations on each that aren't as hard. Oldschool leafblower is a lot easier than modern SM gunlines. AL Zerkers are easier to leverage than WE Zerkers even. And to the extent that an army is OP (or UP), it's easier (or harder), too.

I think it's a bad question, predicated on everything you (reader, not a specific poster) don't use being stupid and braindead simple. Because you've learned the finer points of what you do use. You know where you need to make wiser decisions. You know what you know, but you don't know what you don't know.

This is why I'm so glad I started with SM instead of CWE - despite being an Eldar player at heart. I learned more about the game than I would have.

I think everyone should try more demicompany style lists. My backbone is typically:
1 troop to push forward (Tacs, DAs, etc)
1 troop to hold a position (Tacs, Guardians, Rangers, etc)
1 backline HS units (devs, Reapers, etc)
1 Skirmishers (ASM, Scorpians, Harlies, Spears)
1 Leader with some CC ability (Captains, Libbies, Phoenix Lords, or even Farseers can do it)

Fill to points with, optionally:
-CC threat (Dreads, Assault or Tac termies, Wraithlord, etc)
-Short range nuke (Melta/Plas unit in rhino/pod, Fire Dragons, Wraithguard, etc)
-Heavy fire support (Pred, Prism, etc)

And so forth. It doesn't make a strong list, but it makes a fun list. You have to actually find a use for each part of the game. And you may notice a lot of those units aren't considered great. You might also notice a lot of those units are easily paired with units in other factions, too.

These sorts of lists are lots of fun. Learn how to shoot the choppy and chop the shooty. Learn how to thin out the horde before counterassaulting. Learn how to hold with a non-CC unit to destroy by charging in the rest.

I think this game would be better if (1) more people had tried such 'demi-company' type lists, and (2) if such style lists were more common. They're a lot more fun to play with & against.

Ha, no, having played both.

A pure shooting gunline at least requires you to consider the terrain and position your units appropriately, and to focus on specific targets that are threats.

A pure melee army requires you to find the unit which offers the best combination of killy-ness against all targets [since you only can charge what the opponent is offering] and speed [you want to get there on turn 2 at the latest], and go that way. Roll die when you get there and hope enough of your guys made it there to win.

There's a lot of talk about "knowing who to charge,how to pile in, how to consolidate"... That''s all kind of irrelevant. You will kill off the target unit, or at least enough of it that it's no longer a threat. Charge any unit you think you can reach with charge+pile in, anything else you'll just get overwatched by. The alternating activations order isn't generally relevant, you will be charging or being charged, and therefore it will be effectively IGoUGo, and outside of a mirror match you're going to be charging units that are harmless in melee anyway. The only real concern is "do I use the charge interrupt strategem?"


All things considered, close quarters combat is a powerful tool and can be used very skillfully, but a mass-melee army is the only thing simpler than a artillery gunline.

 Inquisitor Lord Katherine wrote:
Ha, no, having played both.

A pure shooting gunline at least requires you to consider the terrain and position your units appropriately, and to focus on specific targets that are threats.

A pure melee army requires you to find the unit which offers the best combination of killy-ness against all targets [since you only can charge what the opponent is offering] and speed [you want to get there on turn 2 at the latest], and go that way. Roll die when you get there and hope enough of your guys made it there to win.

There's a lot of talk about "knowing who to charge,how to pile in, how to consolidate"... That''s all kind of irrelevant. You will kill off the target unit, or at least enough of it that it's no longer a threat. Charge any unit you think you can reach with charge+pile in, anything else you'll just get overwatched by. The alternating activations order isn't generally relevant, you will be charging or being charged, and therefore it will be effectively IGoUGo, and outside of a mirror match you're going to be charging units that are harmless in melee anyway. The only real concern is "do I use the charge interrupt strategem?"


All things considered, close quarters combat is a powerful tool and can be used very skillfully, but a mass-melee army is the only thing simpler than a artillery gunline.

This may very well be true, and is a qualification of my earlier statement. In my example, I mentioned Skitarii. I also play mono-Slaanesh Daemons, neither of which is very competitive and absolutely must rely on assault phase shenanigans to function. I can imagine if I ran an army that was actually trying to be hypercompetitive, I'd swap Slaanesh Daemons to something that could actually kill stuff in a heartbeat, which would probably simplify my affairs!

 Unit1126PLL wrote:

 Inquisitor Lord Katherine wrote:
Ha, no, having played both.

A pure shooting gunline at least requires you to consider the terrain and position your units appropriately, and to focus on specific targets that are threats.

A pure melee army requires you to find the unit which offers the best combination of killy-ness against all targets [since you only can charge what the opponent is offering] and speed [you want to get there on turn 2 at the latest], and go that way. Roll die when you get there and hope enough of your guys made it there to win.

There's a lot of talk about "knowing who to charge,how to pile in, how to consolidate"... That''s all kind of irrelevant. You will kill off the target unit, or at least enough of it that it's no longer a threat. Charge any unit you think you can reach with charge+pile in, anything else you'll just get overwatched by. The alternating activations order isn't generally relevant, you will be charging or being charged, and therefore it will be effectively IGoUGo, and outside of a mirror match you're going to be charging units that are harmless in melee anyway. The only real concern is "do I use the charge interrupt strategem?"


All things considered, close quarters combat is a powerful tool and can be used very skillfully, but a mass-melee army is the only thing simpler than a artillery gunline.

This may very well be true, and is a qualification of my earlier statement. In my example, I mentioned Skitarii. I also play mono-Slaanesh Daemons, neither of which is very competitive and absolutely must rely on assault phase shenanigans to function. I can imagine if I ran an army that was actually trying to be hypercompetitive, I'd swap Slaanesh Daemons to something that could actually kill stuff in a heartbeat, which would probably simplify my affairs!

Yeah, probably.

Of mention is the fact that there is a lot of skill potential in close quarters, but mass-melee, when all you have is melee units, ignores pretty much all of it because it eschews flexibility and controllability for just pure power. A gunline is marginally more flexible, and a lot more controllable.

So all we need to do is use all these melee units that are fast and hard hitting against all possible targets, and then just hope enough of them made it in; because all the best players just rely on hope as a large factor in their strats, right?

Then we need to charge any unit we think we can reach and remember that our positioning is largely irrelevant because we'll wipe that unit out in 1 round of combat (because our opponents is terribad at screens). This wont at all leave our super-melee-against-all-targets unit in the open for either a counter charge, or just being lit up like a Christmas tree.

The charged unit, despite just being the nearest unit that we charged, will also be harmless in melee and our unit will be the right unit to maximise our "killyness" for that target type. We haven't just charged a blob of Guard with our Wraithblades whilst our Banshees have charged a Leman Russ
for example (whilst also not charging or spreading out to get within 1" of the other Russ' and tie them up because this is just irrelevant and they'll clear it out in 1 round anyway). I mean, as you say, we can only charge what the opponent is offering and they've been nice enough to make sure we can get the optimal charges off for our units and they haven't used any screens.

Then, once we're in combat, we can just disregard the universal interrupt stratagem because nobody ever uses it to interrupt your flow and damage a charging unit before they strike.

You're right - its so much easier than the point and click style of play that an artillery gunline uses after delpoyment. My unit of 10 Berzerkers are just as hard to use as my 60" range 3-mode-take-all-comers Fire Prism. Or even worse, my Shuricannon Wave Serpents with Vector- and Star- Engines that can move 16"+2D6" and then still fire 12 Shuricannon shots at full efficiency and remain at -2 to hit from >12" away. Thats not even counting the 5 Dire Avengers you can be carrying to make up the points difference.

Those Berzerkers can hope all they like, but they are not catching that Serpent...

Hell, an "artillery gunline" doesn't even care about LoS for a number of its units - it literally is just deploy, point and blow it up. If your opponent was lucky they may be able to leave their deployment zone with more than 2/3rds of their force intact only to be able to charge the cheap screen models you've got infront of your main fire base. Only to watch as you then counter-charge / Fall Back later so the said fire base can obliterate you at leisure.

There's a reason gunlines > mass melee; and its not because mass melee is easier to play over 5-6 turns...

I think pure melee needs better planning than a mixed army. At the same time, facing a pure melee army can be more of a challenge as well. With melee armies you need to be more careful about placement in the move and charge phase. It can be easy to block larger models from making a charge. When you charge, you need to plan where you will pile in and consolidate to as well. Consolidating into some artillery is a great idea. Consolidating into some death company... not such a good idea.

 Inquisitor Lord Katherine wrote:
Ha, no, having played both.

A pure shooting gunline at least requires you to consider the terrain and position your units appropriately, and to focus on specific targets that are threats.

A pure melee army requires you to find the unit which offers the best combination of killy-ness against all targets [since you only can charge what the opponent is offering] and speed [you want to get there on turn 2 at the latest], and go that way. Roll die when you get there and hope enough of your guys made it there to win.

There's a lot of talk about "knowing who to charge,how to pile in, how to consolidate"... That''s all kind of irrelevant. You will kill off the target unit, or at least enough of it that it's no longer a threat. Charge any unit you think you can reach with charge+pile in, anything else you'll just get overwatched by. The alternating activations order isn't generally relevant, you will be charging or being charged, and therefore it will be effectively IGoUGo, and outside of a mirror match you're going to be charging units that are harmless in melee anyway. The only real concern is "do I use the charge interrupt strategem?"


All things considered, close quarters combat is a powerful tool and can be used very skillfully, but a mass-melee army is the only thing simpler than a artillery gunline.

Care to share what assault army you play? And perhaps more importantly, when you played it?

Yes and no. It takes more "skill" to win with an army that's weaker since you have to play more efficiently/effectively to get the same results, and a lot of melee-only armies are weaker than gunlines these days, but I wouldn't say that melee armies generally are easier/harder.

The thing that a lot of the comments are based on is that melee is shorter-ranged than gunlines, and what you do in the movement phase with a melee unit matters a lot more than what you do with, say, a Basilisk; melee armies do certainly have a different set of decisions to make, but your movement decisions sort of replace the gunline army's target priority decisions given that you don't really get to choose who you attack with a melee unit, it's really just who's closest.

 Nevelon wrote:
I think an all melee army is easier to play poorly.

I really like this answer. Well put.

 Luke_Prowler wrote:

Care to share what assault army you play? And perhaps more importantly, when you played it?

Space Wolves, though I've since pretty much dropped my cqc elements in favor of more guns, and I was never totally mass-melee, because it's boring as h***. However, I did have a heavy cqc focus last edition. I play custodians too, but only up to 1500. Also, this edition I've swapped armies with a world eaters player once, and a few different tyranids players.

I don't have a lot of experience, though I have a lot of experience on the other side, with Guard, Sisters, Space Wolves, and now Deathwatch and AdMech. The fact of the matter is that I've tried it, and found it generally uninteresting and unengaging.

shakul wrote:

Spoiler:

So all we need to do is use all these melee units that are fast and hard hitting against all possible targets, and then just hope enough of them made it in; because all the best players just rely on hope as a large factor in their strats, right?

Then we need to charge any unit we think we can reach and remember that our positioning is largely irrelevant because we'll wipe that unit out in 1 round of combat (because our opponents is terribad at screens). This wont at all leave our super-melee-against-all-targets unit in the open for either a counter charge, or just being lit up like a Christmas tree.

The charged unit, despite just being the nearest unit that we charged, will also be harmless in melee and our unit will be the right unit to maximise our "killyness" for that target type. We haven't just charged a blob of Guard with our Wraithblades whilst our Banshees have charged a Leman Russ
for example (whilst also not charging or spreading out to get within 1" of the other Russ' and tie them up because this is just irrelevant and they'll clear it out in 1 round anyway). I mean, as you say, we can only charge what the opponent is offering and they've been nice enough to make sure we can get the optimal charges off for our units and they haven't used any screens.

Then, once we're in combat, we can just disregard the universal interrupt stratagem because nobody ever uses it to interrupt your flow and damage a charging unit before they strike.

You're right - its so much easier than the point and click style of play that an artillery gunline uses after delpoyment. My unit of 10 Berzerkers are just as hard to use as my 60" range 3-mode-take-all-comers Fire Prism. Or even worse, my Shuricannon Wave Serpents with Vector- and Star- Engines that can move 16"+2D6" and then still fire 12 Shuricannon shots at full efficiency and remain at -2 to hit from >12" away. Thats not even counting the 5 Dire Avengers you can be carrying to make up the points difference.

Those Berzerkers can hope all they like, but they are not catching that Serpent...

Hell, an "artillery gunline" doesn't even care about LoS for a number of its units - it literally is just deploy, point and blow it up. If your opponent was lucky they may be able to leave their deployment zone with more than 2/3rds of their force intact only to be able to charge the cheap screen models you've got infront of your main fire base. Only to watch as you then counter-charge / Fall Back later so the said fire base can obliterate you at leisure.

There's a reason gunlines > mass melee; and its not because mass melee is easier to play over 5-6 turns...

It's as point-and-click as an artillery line, and you don't even get to chose what you click on. So more like a QTE, to keep up the video game references.

Note that, the Fire Prism is effectively controllable, it therefore at least has the option to apply skill. You can chose it's target, you can move it to different areas where it will be presented with different things it can do.

The Berzerkers will engage enemy units in the order that the enemy chooses to present them to them, and have to always be with the unit they're fighting. This means they have to be going that way, when they move, otherwise they won't make it. You don't have decisions to make, They go that way, they stab the first thing they meet, rinse and repeat until you run out of berzerkers.

There are several underlying assumptions that I made:
1: you will kill whatever you're fighting. This isn't actually unreasonable. a rhino-borne Khornate Berzerker unit will actually kill or at least come close to killing a Razorback in 1 battle round [which is the period between when they can potentially charge]. If you need some security, there's a strategem for that. Second, the enemy is going to offer you things that they don't care about that you're bad at killing, so you need to have units that can kill anything swiftly within their charge cycle.
2: the enemy unit won't be effective in close combat. Also a safe assumption. Even if you're not charging guardsmen or tanks [which is honestly what you're probably doing anyway], you charged, you fight first, you get to destroy half or [probably] more of the target unit before it fights, neutering it.

I think there's a false equivalence between "stronger" and "less skilled". Fundamentally, I didn't enjoy playing an army swap with a World Eaters player, and I don't know how people can. There wasn't a decision making process, or more precisely all the choices were the same. At least, with an artillery line I can chose to shoot the tank or the infantry, or the unit with the AT gun or the unit with the antiinfantry gun. Without a doubt, an artillery line is stronger than the berzerker rush, however, there's not a lot of tactical skill involved in the berzerker rush. There is tactical skill in an artillery line, though it's fairly intuitive and noncomplex. Basically, an artillery line is powerful and fairly easy, but a berzerker rush requires less skill.

I could make an army of all repentia. It would most certainly not be strong, but it would also almost certainly not require any skill at all to play.

This is not to say that close quarters inherently requires no skill. As I said, it can be used very effectively to augment the power of other units, zone areas, harass the enemy, and draw fire in a combined-arms force. However, "I have a lot of the same 1-2 melee units, and they're all going to go that way," sort of ignore most of that in favor of achieving maximum efficiency and going that way.

Not more or less, just different.
I've never actually faced or run a pure melee army but being mostly a Space Wolves guy I'm usually referred to as a melee player.
Playing a melee army usually means having a number of plans before the game and knowing damn well most of them are going to go out the window due to your opponent's deployment alone. Constantly number crunching to figure out where the most beneficial charges are.
Charge distance?
Overwatch?
How much damage can they do?
How much damage can you do?
Can you end the fight on their turn?
How exposed will you be if you win on the charge?
Can they wuss out with no penalty?
Can you even lock them in combat at all?
Is another unit that's further away actually a better target?
Should I multi-charge?
Can I bypass the closest units and chase something more important? Should I?

As an ork player, I would say no. Pushing a 100-boy blob up the table before it dies isn't skillful. All of the skill for orks comes in the movement phase, and deployment.

If Orks shot better, but assaulted worse, that would still be the same. Positioning, target priority and risk management is where the skill lies.

My buddy plays Tau. I play World Eaters. You're god damn right I have to outplay him in order to win.

To consistently win with yes. Melee combat is less about straight killing and more about positioning as killing your target often ends up with a unit trade and melee units tend to be pricey.

I believe most things remain the same between shooting and assault.

However the assault phase simply needs to get better rolls to actually succeed as the game favors shooting outright.

Target priority, positioning, CP usage, all are generally the same.

I would argue that no style of army requires more skill to play than any other. Even if you aren't actively using a facet of the game in your army, you still need the skill in that area to offset what your opponent does or you will lose.

A good player with an close combat list will beat a bad player with a gun line because the bad player will not properly deploy and move to avoid just how much a good assault can mess up a gun line.

Similarly, a good player with a gun line will know how to position his units to put a bad player with a close combat list from getting to grips with the meat of his shooting.

Pure melee lists are almost not existant, they will all have at least a bit of shooting and/or a bit of psy support. I think that the only real pure melee is Khorne.

In any case, assault lists are not so cut and dry as "composed by things fast and deadly that rush the enemy". If you do this, you will always fail, it's like making a shooting list with only lascannons, you can't really expect to win. Those kind of models cost a lot of points for little durability, you will bleed a too big part of your army every turn.

If you play only slow durable elements, you will be led around and destroyed by turn 4/5.

True assault lists mix fast elements with slow durable elements. Not necessarily all deadly, you have stuff like hormagants and slaneesh fiends who are there to make preparation work for your big threats.

Fast elements are decent targets but make it to the enemy lines before the opponent has a chance to cripple them too much, while the slow part is usually a bad target for shooting.

When playing those kind of lists, planning ahead the interaction between the fast and the slow part can be really hard, since you have to foresee what will be the target priority of your opponent.

Mix into this a bit of shooting to take out the glassiest parts of the opponent list, some deepstrike and some psy and you come out with lists that are really rewarding to play well and extremely punishing at the same time.

Mellee is generally much more difficult to pull off correctly compared to shooting and magic.

A balanced army is the pinnacle of skill, if facing another balanced army. Games doesnt get better than that.

The less phases you have, the less skill it takes - because you only have to succes or fail at one thing. Succeeding with an all melee list doesnt take skill, even though it is “hard” - it takes luck and it takes the right matchup.

So: the more complex, the more skill.

If you're playing a CC army against a shooting army, don't you need every bit of skill at shooting army playing as a shooty player?

If you're playing a shooty army against a CC army, don't you need every bit of skill at CC army playing as a CC player?

I don't know about you, but when I get competitive, I'm playing both sides of the table, through several variations, to understand what choices my opponent has, and thus what he is likely to do. To do that, you need to be able to play the opposing army. So isn't saying one army takes more skill, when the best players need to fully understand all options both sides of the table have, kinda wrong on the premise?

I still think combined arms is harder when all is balanced, and UP is harder than OP regardless of style when not balanced, but I think there are a lot of problems with presumptions here.

The real answer to this question is the assault phase is definitely more complicated than any other phase in the game, an "assault army" can be more skill based yes, but the issue is if you are running an assault army as just assault and no shooting or psychic that is a mistake. Building a balanced list is a huge part of the game if you want to play competitively.

It's embarrassing that this is still being debated