Tweaking Assault

Solid Snake vs. Hulk, Hokunin

Eriochrome has some thoughts on improving close-combat. Let's have a look!

Eriochrome Wrote:

I sat down and looked at the assault stuff again.  Before I start to rewrite I wanted to brief you on the ideas.

The basic structure stays the same:

Assault Phase

1.  Check Who is in Assault.  All Units with a model within 6 inches of an enemy are part of the assault.

2   Attacking Player (Players whose turn it is) Gets Free Consolidation Move for All his models in assault.

3.  Combat Cycle
      a.  Attacking Player units does CC shooting and CC melee attacks (Not 2 separate steps)
      b.  Defending Player Checks Leadership for all his units in Assault
      c.  Attacking Player Makes Consolidation Moves for all his units
      d.  Both Players check all units for Assault Status to see if any units have disengaged or been disengaged from then apply changes to suppression marker.
      e.  If Assault still active, restart cycle switching attacking and defending player using units still in assault from d.
      f.   If Assault no longer active for any units proceed to Assault phase end.

4.  Assault Phase End.

SandWyrm's Comments:

What would you think of making the free consolidation move for the attacker dependent on them not getting suppressed by defensive fire?

I think the CC shooting and melee attacks will need to be separate steps for the purposes of keeping the rules clear. But we track hits/pens for suppression in a combined way. As in, every hit (shooting or melee) increments the hit die, and only the first pen (shooting or melee) gets a marker awarded.

Special Rule to be added...

Close Combat Specialist:  This model may make a free consolidation move to engage any enemy model during the assault phase when it is a defender anytime the enemy model's makes a consolidation move.  This consolidation moves comes after all the attacking units consolidation moves and follows all the normal rules for coherence with the note that all other models in the unit which lack this rule are considered already moved.

So, to make sure I understand this right... If a model is a CCS, then it can consolidate during the enemy's round, after all enemy models have consolidated? If so, I like it. Though I think that maybe it should be weapon-dependent rather than an attribute of the unit itself.

I'm also toying with the idea of weapons having initiative values. So that models with higher initiative CCWs have more freedom of movement, and can break away from models with lower initiative weapons more easily. Think of a hero storming a stairway and fighting past (without killing them) several guards.

This Assault Phase is very similar to the original one except that the shooting and cc attacks are one time to avoid generating twice the nerve markers for units that can both shoot and cc as units cannot clear markers fast and just being able to kill some one with a shot and with a club should not be better inherently than just killing 2 with the club.

Which was always my intention, though it may not have been clear. So cool!

The phase has also moved end turn consolidation moves  into the combat cycle to avoid getting double consolidation at the end of the combat.

Except that in testing, we found that you needed a free consolidation after combat if the combat happened on your turn. So that you would have a chance to duck into cover before your opponent moved and shot during his turn. Or else you were dead meat. So we need a 'successful defense' rule or some such way of accommodating this.

The combat specialist rule gets your guy with the chainsword or a unit with all cc weapons chances to engage enemies.  You still have to live through an set of opponents attacks first but now if you are the defender then you do not have to make it through 2 sets (Attacker Shots you, you get to do no attacks then move to engage, enemy gets to cc you, then you get to attack with melee) before.  If you start as the attacker the point is less important since at the start of the combat you got that free assault move.  The move is limited that it has to take you in base to base with a model already involved in the combat so you cannot use it to spread the combat during the opponent turn but can be used make it easier to spread it when you are the attacker.

We'll see how it works out. But guys with CCWs have it pretty good now. They can engage an enemy model, and avoid the enemy's shooting for that round. This can force a bunch of rifle infantry to pile on him, even when they'd rather stand back and shoot instead.

Thoughts?