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yukishiro1 wrote:

 the_scotsman wrote:

yukishiro1 wrote:
Not sure I'm seeing a lot of melee buffs in the new ad mech book. Their best melee unit got nerfed, some of the bad ones got buffed, but I don't think it works out to all that much better melee.

I don't see how melee robots will ever be realistically usable no matter how punchy they get, it's just wasted trading most of the time. A unit that costs 100 points per model and doesn't have fly or another good delivery mechanism is always going to struggle to trade up into literally anything. And single robot unit don't seem attractive either as they're basically just bad dreadnoughts.

Give the Cybernetica Datasmith the Lucius Solar Flare and you can deep strike them straight into the enemy lines. Use the stratagem to give them Invocation of Machine Might in addition to whatever canticle is on them atm, and you've got a super easy charge (roll 3d6 take the two highest and nothing stops you from rerolling that).

From there, if you want, you can use Electro-Shocked to give a unit fight last, you can use Crushing Weight for mortal wounds, whatever you like.

I mean...sort-of? They've got a massive footprint and can't kool-aid man through terrain, so your opponent would have to be pretty terrible at screening to let you DS a squad of bots into anything they'll trade up into. And that's still only a 76% chance at successfully charging, even assuming you have a good target, so although it's reliable, you'll still fail it 1 in 4 games.

So? I'll succeed in 3/4 games. And since it's just a game with nothing on the line a 25% chance of failure isn't even a concern.

yukishiro1 wrote:
Don't get me wrong, I can envision theoretical scenarios they'd be good in...but it all seems pretty niche. Most of the time it seems like they'll just struggle to get into anything they can earn their points back against.

They don't have to make their points back. They have to help me win the game.

Neither of those statements actually seem like an argument for them - anything can be hand-waived away by "it's just a game," and expensive, hard to maneuver, not particularly fast, not particularly tanky, non-ob-sec melee models that can't heroically intervene don't generally do a good job of helping win you the game if they aren't making back their points by smashing stuff - but by all means, if you enjoy it?

They're certainly not as terrible as they used to be.

 Polonius wrote:
It's a weird misconception that certain armies aren't meant to fight in melee. Different armies have different amounts and quality of dedicated melee units, but every army, since at least 2nd edition, has had tools to fight in melee. Not always to win with a melee focused army, but to still use the fight phase in a positive, not a negative, for their army.

If anything, 8th/9th took AWAY combat options for IG and Tau, the former losing Rough Riders completely while the latter saw kroot go from medium weight combat threat to chaff.

++ to this. The OP's premise is flawed. Maybe if tau get something we can revisit it, but none of the 9th ed. books so far involved armies with no melee options. (Even necrons had viable ones, even if they had to spam wraiths to truly go all out on melee)

If GW solve Tau's melee issues with Kroot and there are some new Kroot models (even resculpts of current models), I will reward them with money by starting another faction.

I'd love a 25 PL combat patrol of Kroot with the existing 4 kits redone in plastic. It would also act as a gateway into the Tau, which I've never explored before.

PenitentJake wrote:
If GW solve Tau's melee issues with Kroot and there are some new Kroot models (even resculpts of current models), I will reward them with money by starting another faction.

I'd love a 25 PL combat patrol of Kroot with the existing 4 kits redone in plastic. It would also act as a gateway into the Tau, which I've never explored before.

Kroot are certainly an interesting Xenos race in general. In design, lore and potentially in play style. GW just needs to flesh them out like they did in DOW.

yukishiro1 wrote:
Neither of those statements actually seem like an argument for them - anything can be hand-waived away by "it's just a game," and expensive, hard to maneuver, not particularly fast, not particularly tanky, non-ob-sec melee models that can't heroically intervene don't generally do a good job of helping win you the game if they aren't making back their points by smashing stuff - but by all means, if you enjoy it?

They're certainly not as terrible as they used to be.

And your statement that it might fail isn't any sort of argument not to do this deep-strike charge maneuver. "You might fail." So?

There you go again with that "making their points back" stuff. How much an opposing unit costs pts wise is not a victory condition so it's not relevant to me. How much I lose pts wise isn't either. So long as the victory conditions of the mission are achieved.

If designed correctly, lots of things can become good melee units. I mean, look at Deathguard terminators. Those things only move 5 inches. But wow they are a great melee unit. They absolutely bully stuff on objectives ! And they aren't obsec either. A good melee unit doesn't need to have fly as an absolute requirement.

ccs wrote:

yukishiro1 wrote:
Neither of those statements actually seem like an argument for them - anything can be hand-waived away by "it's just a game," and expensive, hard to maneuver, not particularly fast, not particularly tanky, non-ob-sec melee models that can't heroically intervene don't generally do a good job of helping win you the game if they aren't making back their points by smashing stuff - but by all means, if you enjoy it?

They're certainly not as terrible as they used to be.

And your statement that it might fail isn't any sort of argument not to do this deep-strike charge maneuver. "You might fail." So?

There you go again with that "making their points back" stuff. How much an opposing unit costs pts wise is not a victory condition so it's not relevant to me. How much I lose pts wise isn't either. So long as the victory conditions of the mission are achieved.

You can't really have a conversation with someone who doesn't read what you write. Enjoy your DSing punchybots, I wish you luck with them (honestly, not being snarky here, even if personally I'd lick my lips if my opponent did that, it's something way easier to handle than a lot of the stuff in the ad mech book).

Tau briefly had decent melee.

There was a time when the monster keyword was on certain suits and that gave them melee attacks that had built in armor penetration.

I would like to see tau go back in that direction, with their large suits gaining some basic melee attacks that have armor reduction and can cause multiple damage.

Additonally the FW rules for flechette discharges on suits as a battlesuit option for melee would be interesting. If suits could take onager gauntlets and flechhete discharges built in to something, even if it was something like 1 per 3 that would be interesting and give crisis suits more purpose.

Theoratically, there is nothing in lore that states that the battle suits that Tau makes can't melee. If you can build a battle suit that shoots well, building one that can fight shouldn't be that hard. And Kroot can definitely be buffed to fight better, if they are so inclined.

I assume Tau don't make melee battlesuits because Tau are generally bad at melee combat. Why try to compensate for your weakness when you can play to your strength?

Farsight veteran crisis have decent melee stats. If they had decent melee weapons they'd be halfway scary in combat.

Generally it's a good idea to make factions less mono-focused as it causes no end of design issues, as Tau's recent problems have shown.

The danger is that the melee solutions for some of these factions might only be one unit which then means every player of that faction has to take that unit which of course leads to homogenization in list building or ruining thematic army builds. If Bullgryns are the only viable melee unit in Guard, what if you personally don't like Bullgryns or they don't fit your army's fluff/theme? You're either forced into taking a unit you dislike or you suck it up and play an essentially non-functional army.

It`s ok for armies to have some melee options, because it`s hard to play the mission pack with only shooting army.
What really bothers me, is that every faction have access to fight last, Admech having such strong ability for 1 CP sound to good and you don`t require any setup or through. In practice if the Admech player screen right with strong melee unit, the only effective way of clearing it is with shooting and you don`t really want to go in shooting match vs Admech.

ccs wrote:

Eldenfirefly wrote:

Look at Admech. Used to be they are super shooty, but if you got to close combat with them, they didn't really have anything that could fight you. Wow look at admech now. Their close combat units pack a punch!

I think you've never fought ectro-priests.

damnit you beat me to it.

or dragoons, for that matter. or the drill of death transport for said electropriests.

Marin wrote:
It`s ok for armies to have some melee options, because it`s hard to play the mission pack with only shooting army.
What really bothers me, is that every faction have access to fight last, Admech having such strong ability for 1 CP sound to good and you don`t require any setup or through. In practice if the Admech player screen right with strong melee unit, the only effective way of clearing it is with shooting and you don`t really want to go in shooting match vs Admech.

It does only work via either a unit of electropriests or a character, and it does not work on monsters and vehicles. Really, I'd only be concerned about it if I was charging in against something actually melee-capable that also had a character nearby.

I'm not gonna kill Electropriests in melee. Theyre T3 W1. I'm gonna shoot them with...anything. Until they stop moving.

Also there might still be a significant range between "can participate in melee" and "can WIN in melee". Just looking at guard we currently have as "working" melee Options:

we currently have no boni to charge distance and no flying CC unit
Bullgryns => pretty sturdy, but relatively slow, damage Output less than one would wish for
Deathriders => very sturdy for 15 points, underwhelming output with only one attack and that is only strong on the charge, but M10 at least, locked to one regiment
Crusaders => again: relatively sturdy for 16 points, but a d1 powersword has not much output
Catachan Infantry with straken and priests (or to a smaller degree custom slum fighters) => drown them in S3 attacks and hope for the best

Taken together: I would say as long as they don't take away the Death riders (and ideally open them for other Regiments), IG has enough to participate in melee, but are not really a faction winning in melee. So takeaway point: even if everybody has units that can be used in the CC phase doesn't mean the dedicated CC factions loose their trademark.