Welcome To Our New Members! Plus Other Stuff...

Gateway to the West; by David Wright

Sandwyrm here, It looks like we picked up 4 new members over the last week. Welcome! We're a remarkably civil group in our discussions, so please feel free to dive in at any time and contribute your opinions.

There's a few other things I wanted to update everyone on so we're on the same page.

First, I'm dropping "Technical Skill" as a unit characteristic in favor of specific special rules as TheDaR wisely suggested.

Girl In Fear; Charlotte Estelle Littlehales

I'm going to leave Nerve in for now though as I want psychology to play a much bigger part in the game than any of our competitors has to-date. Such that a monster with the Fear[1] rule would reduce the nerve of every unit within 12" by 1, for instance. Which gives us a great way to differentiate Space Bugs from Space Orcs. Or even Super Space Knights from regular ones.

Finally, I want to go over my thoughts on how close combat should work:

Oblivion_NecronNinja said in my unit stats post:

"As written, the current Weapons Skill stat represents gear quality, as opposed to skill/training. I don't think that's what you're going for, UNLESS you want to reduce melee to a hyper-deadly "one successful roll kills a dude" situation, with very little specialized melee gear. Which is actually pretty brilliant."

Yeah, pretty much. Having a super-hammer isn't much different from having a super-sword when facing a bunch of conscripted peasants with sticks. The hammer is really only a boon when fighting armored targets. So WS should really encompass several factors instead of just how 'trained' you are.

Such as:

• Size and/or strength of the model
• Quality of weapons/claws
• Use of Poison
• Specialized CC Training

So an untrained Ogre with a Gun-Club might be just as generally effective in combat as an unarmored sword-master with 10 years of combat experience. Using a straight weapon skill comparison, we can determine their relative likelihood of landing a killing blow on each other. Unless one of the opponents is armored or has a personal shield, I don't think we really need another test after that.

As for the general sequence, I'm thinking of:

1. Somebody Assaults
2. Defender(s) can shoot in response or fall back OR...
3. Choose to prepare themselves for combat (forcing a roll-off for who strikes first).
4. Attacker strikes first (auto if defender shot, rolled-off if they didn't)
5. Attacking is a straight WS on WS test.
6. Hits on unarmored troops are auto-kills. Armored targets must be penetrated as well.
7. Defenders that received at least one hit take a morale check. If failed, they fall back.
8. If Defenders hold, they may then attack.
9. Attackers take a morale check if hit, may attack again if they hold.

Thus, combat would continue until one unit forces another to fall back (or kills them). There will never be a time that a unit is 'stuck' in combat and cannot be shot at. So if your troops can't hurt that big monster, the best thing to do is to fall back and let your other troops shoot him. But that also forces you to give him ground. Representing the monster's ability to rampage through your lines and create breaks through which waves of smaller nasties can enter. :)

Thoughts?