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 BrotherHaraldus wrote:
I'd say a major factor is that many of the creatures and armours present are simply tough enough to shrug off ranged fire all the way to melee.

No they aren't. The only reason they do it now is that ranges aren't 28mm scale. If everything was true 28mm scale assault armies would be shot to death long before they could get into range. Melee combat is about as "realistic" as sniping the melta gun out of a squad by blocking LOS to every other model in the target squad with some spare vehicles, since that's apparently the only way that your trained soldiers are able to figure out how to shoot at a specific enemy.

The more resilience increases, the better close combat becomes.

This is not true. Close combat only becomes viable if ranged weapons are weaker than defenses AND melee weapons are somehow magically more powerful than ranged weapons. If you don't make a sword magically more powerful than a gun then all you have is a bunch of armored troops that can't kill each other at all, and fights decided by who calls in the first orbital bombardment.

Actually, a medieval mace does notisably more damage than a modern pistol.
You seem to ignore things written about close quarters modern warfare also.

 koooaei wrote:
Actually, a medieval mace does notisably more damage than a modern pistol.

Yes, but why are we just talking about pistols? Compare that mace to a modern .50 cal machine gun instead.

You seem to ignore things written about close quarters modern warfare also.

Yeah, because guess what: modern close quarters combat refers primarily to shooting people at close range. You don't have modern soldiers running around with swords instead of guns.

Fantasy in space etc. If you want 'realistic' 'assaults' then go play Infinity - its a damn good game and I thoroughly enjoy it despite it being all guns all the time.

As for the shooting vs assault balance, biggest though would be to just drop the double standards. You can shoot turn one but not assault. Shoot from outflank but not assault. Shoot from transport but not assault.

If you start with roughly even shooting and assault, and then apply nerf after nerf after nerf to assault, then its no surprise that assault ends up as pure garbage. So rather than apply a buff to counteract these stupid nerfs, why not just do away with the nerfs themselves?

The next thing would be sweeping advance into nearby units. Shooty units get to deal damage for the entire game, assault troops only on the later turns - the least you could do for that trade-off is to allow them to deal that damage consistently, rather than randomly stopping 1" away

 Dakkamite wrote:
Fantasy in space etc.

That's the problem. GW insist on clinging to obsolete mechanics from a 1980s fantasy game even when they don't work well with the theme and mechanics of 40k. It's like the IGOUGO system: it's bad for the game, but GW doesn't want to do a proper re-write of the entire game so we're stuck with making small changes in a desperate attempt to keep things even vaguely functional. Instead of asking how we can make assault and shooting equally effective strategies we should be asking why GW keeps making dedicated assault units in a shooting game instead of recognizing that 40k is not WHFB.

If you want 'realistic' 'assaults' then go play Infinity - its a damn good game and I thoroughly enjoy it despite it being all guns all the time.

The day Infinity releases a tank warfare expansion is the day I drop 40k and counts-as my collection into Infinity. Until then I'm kind of stuck with 40k, as flawed as it is.

As for the shooting vs assault balance, biggest though would be to just drop the double standards. You can shoot turn one but not assault. Shoot from outflank but not assault. Shoot from transport but not assault.

Fine, just as soon as shooting gets boosted to "wipe out your entire unit in a single turn" levels like assault can be when it overcomes all of those obstacles. How about a leadership test (at -1 for each shooting casualty inflicted on a unit that turn) for every unit at the end of each shooting phase, with a 'sweeping advance" if the unit fails? And we need to introduce rules for being locked in shooting and protected from enemy assault units. If a unit makes a shooting attack it becomes locked in shooting with the target unit until all units on one side of the shooting are destroyed or fall back, and you can't assault any unit that is locked in a shooting.

If you start with roughly even shooting and assault, and then apply nerf after nerf after nerf to assault, then its no surprise that assault ends up as pure garbage. So rather than apply a buff to counteract these stupid nerfs, why not just do away with the nerfs themselves?

Because the premise of shooting and assault being roughly even is a bad one. Movement and shooting should be the vast majority of the game, and assault should be something you occasionally do to finish off the last remains of a unit that you've crippled and suppressed with shooting.

The next thing would be sweeping advance into nearby units.

Been there, done that, didn't work. Reducing the game to "get into charge range of Tau, wipe out a unit a turn while they can't do anything to stop it" wasn't much fun.

Wow, you seem to hate the current system. But mind that 40k has tons of fluff of swords and shields.

Basically i was attracted to 40k in the first place by the mind-blowing assaults of infantry rushing insanely forward against a hail of bullets fired at them. And for every 10 dead - 1 will eventually get there and start wrecking havoc with his crude weapon, firing pistol from time to time, screaming and tearing the enemies with his bare hands till he gets downed by a bayonete or a close-ranged gunshot. But more will eventually come. Fluffwise, those 'screaming idiots with swords' as you call them are much more numerous than tabletop. I'd really like to field 200 boyz vs your 20 firewarriors and will gladly accept 100 not getting midfield, 80 not getting close but the rest 20 finally chopping some limbs off da squishy enemy. But it'd be unfair for me to buy 200 models, paint them, transport them, etc. Good thing it's fantasy so we can say that da boyz are not just regular umiez that get easilly killed. They're insanely tough and durable crazy warmachines that can easilly survive a straight gunshot. So now i need not so many of them to accomplish the same goal.
Or that a power-armored space marine has fairly good chances of plain ignoring a lazgun shooting at him and would prefer to go face to face with someone hiding in a trench rather than wasting time and pricy ammunition shooting at obscured hands and helmets that sometimes apear over the ground level.
And don't forget - the ammunition is limited. Sometimes you won't have enough to kill all the enemies even if you're 100% accurate. So you have to pick up an axe or a sword and continue fighting cause it's all that's left.

Basically, there are NO difficulties in justifying close combat in wh40k fluffwise. Actually, guns are much harder to product, maintain and support with ammunition than swords and axes. And if you got 100 mad orkses and 10 shootas, 10 sluggas and a ton of metal garbage...u get 10 shootaboyz, 10 sluggaboyz and around 60-70 boyz (cause others will get killed in a fight for shiny shooty stuff) with nothing but crude metal parts used as weapons. And 10 shootas, 10 sluggas and 60-70 boyz will be Much more effective than plain 10 shootas, 10 sluggas.

Maybe we should increase pointcost of ranged weapons?

If the game provides such ammount of possibilities and rules for brutal close combat - that must be utilised and ballanced. That's what i think. And the thread is about ballancing things out. Cause with current ruleset basic assaulters are too overpriced for what they can do.

I insist that as resilience becomes better, so does melee.

The higher universal resilience becomes, the harder it becomes for you to shoot down Alien X before it can reach you, and the greater percentage of the total fight is spent at close quarters, where it is at a massive advantage.

Assault units tend to be awfully, awfully tough (Assault Termies), awfully fast (Dark Eldar) or awfully many (Orks) or combinations of the above (Tyranids).

Remember LoS blocking as well, and deep striking, and so on.

Again, shooting has not scaled as well as resilience has.

Tau move just fine anyway. Riptides are JSJ, after all. And they can shoot you through a window and ignore all the cover granted by such terrain.

@Peregrine- The issue with Shooting shoudl be way better than assault has everything to do with army balance in the game as designed. There are armies that have assault as their only meaningful way of dealing damage....now you can believe that this should not be the case....but it is and as such the 2 should be relatively balanced in the game.

There are plenty of other games where it is not the case (Drop Zone commander for one has no "Assault", just Close Quarters battle which could be assault or close up shooting. And that only happens when you are in a building.) But in a game with magic etc...why can't assault be as powerful as shooting? Using Modern Warfare is a poor analog to a game where aliens exist in warfare.

Martel732 wrote:
That's too much of an if-come-maybe solution. And Wave Serpents can abuse LoS blocking terrain just fine by being hidden from >50% of the enemy list while focus firing down a target.

True, but I've already built it, and they already came. It works in many cases. Take from that what you will (granted I am not a tournament player, dismiss me if you please). As far as the wave serpents, they're abusive in a lot of ways and not something I really care to try to fix. My friend who plays eldar won't bring six of them because we both know its not fun.

True shooting is better than in last edition but part of this view is because of a couple really powerful shooting armies out there right now (wave serpents, riptides, etc.) If these were to be reigned in would people still be as frustrated with assault?

Assault should not be relegated to a side note. It's one of three phases and is absolutely integral to the setting. We're talking superhuman space knights with armor that can shrug off a platoons worth of shooting and proceed to hack them apart with chainsaw-sword. Its fantasy, and no matter how much one claims to be an authority on what war will look like in a dystopian galaxy forty thousand years from now, melee combat has its place. Also, to diminish it further risks eliminating a very tactical aspect from the game. Like having rock paper scissors and removing one option.

I find it odd that Epic Armageddon does not seem to have any of the problems 40k 6th ed has.
The game flows in an intuitive way, and despite being for 'veteran players' it has much less complication in the rules, but with greater tactical complexity.

Maybe because EA has a more interactive game turn, (found in most modern war games,) and a elegant suppression system it can lend it self to allow modern type units to fight in modern type battles.

If shooting can suppress units,(reduce in game effectiveness) without having to cause physical damage to the units.
Then fire power can be used to control enemy movement , mobility can be use to take objective, and assault can be used to contest objectives.

I think 40k needs a more interactive game turn , and a basic suppression system included in the core damage resolution.
But if you are changing 40k rules that much a complete re-write would be best IMO.

JubbJubbz wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
That's too much of an if-come-maybe solution. And Wave Serpents can abuse LoS blocking terrain just fine by being hidden from >50% of the enemy list while focus firing down a target.

True, but I've already built it, and they already came. It works in many cases. Take from that what you will (granted I am not a tournament player, dismiss me if you please). As far as the wave serpents, they're abusive in a lot of ways and not something I really care to try to fix. My friend who plays eldar won't bring six of them because we both know its not fun.

True shooting is better than in last edition but part of this view is because of a couple really powerful shooting armies out there right now (wave serpents, riptides, etc.) If these were to be reigned in would people still be as frustrated with assault?

Assault should not be relegated to a side note. It's one of three phases and is absolutely integral to the setting. We're talking superhuman space knights with armor that can shrug off a platoons worth of shooting and proceed to hack them apart with chainsaw-sword. Its fantasy, and no matter how much one claims to be an authority on what war will look like in a dystopian galaxy forty thousand years from now, melee combat has its place. Also, to diminish it further risks eliminating a very tactical aspect from the game. Like having rock paper scissors and removing one option.

I'm not dismissing you, but I can't get Eldar players to not use Wave Serpents. So we are kinda playing two different games. To be perfectly honest, at this point, I would be less frustrated if I could get into assault at all. But don't forget this problem started with the bale drake and then just got worse for meq assault in general.

I see your point Martel. I play csm and like to have assault elements but like you said, its basically a different game if you/your opponents don't consciously reign in the most powerful units. I don't ever take (or own) more than one baledrake as its just not fun for my opponent, and thus not fun for me.

For my conscience I will admit to proxy'ing baledrake for a game to have two when my childhood friend came to town to play his assault BA army. Baleflamers and preferred enemy as far as the eye could see...

Oh, some guyz also would like to see what random shooting range can do with a game

I think it's time to summ it up.

Most people agree that charging distance should become reliable - 7' or 3'+d6.