Instead of cluttering Matt's thread, I thought I'd start a new thread here. I mentioned that I really like many aspects of Epic 40k, but prefer the close assault rules of Epic: Armageddon, which integrate melee and firefights far more seemlessly than Epic 40k does. For those not familiar with it, Epic 40k resolves assaults with a single die roll which automatically breaks the loser. Blast markers figure prominently in the modifiers for that die roll, which I like, but still leaving everything up to one roll feels a bit swingy. The Epic 40k rules for assaults also diverge pretty significantly from the regular shooting rules and futhermore seem to steal the thunder from firefights (you rarely fight in a firefight if you fought in an assault, and assaults seem to be much more powerful). Both of the latter two issues are problems, in my mind, as I like some symmetry in combat rules and I think assaults and firefights should be integrated and compementary, as in EA.

So what would a hybrid of E40k and EA look like? I am an advocate of trying all rules as written at least once, but it would be interesting to brainstorm a bit. The most straightforward solution would just be to treat assaults as regular shooting, with attacker and defender rolling their attack dice simultaneously, and units in base to base combat using their assault value as their firepower.

So, 2 Assault Marine stands in base to base combat with 2 Skar Boyz and a Shooty Boyz, with 1 stand of Devastators supporting, would have the Marine player rolling 10 (4+4+2) firepower worth of dice (Space Marine Assault value 3 for the two base-to-base units, +1 each for the Assault ability, +1 Firepower for the Devastator, +1 for the Heavy Weapons ability). The Ork player would roll 7 firepower worth of dice (3+3+1), since the base-to-base Ork stands each have an Assault score of 2, +1 for each of the Skar Boyz due to their Assault ability, -1 for the Shooty Boyz Heavy Weapon ability. If the Ork detachment had two Blast markers, their firepower would drop to 5 (as normal), and they would check the firepower chart to see that they will roll 3 attack dice against the Marines (who count as infantry in the open as they charge, even if they are in cover). The Marines would normally roll 5 dice for their firepower 10, but the Orks are defending some ruins so they count as infantry in cover (meaning the Marine player will only roll 4 dice).

Whichever side rolled the most hits is the winner and the loser is broken as usual. If this is tied, then the assaulting side is the loser. Casualties are chosen as normal from the closest eligible targets (according to armour value).

The only downside to this method is that the default Epic 40k rules allow you to ignore the tough armour of enemy units, since all attack dice roll against a fixed value according to how soundly the enemy was beaten in the single die roll (for example, even a Terminator unit can be hit on a 2+ if they lose badly enough). The above method makes high armour units a lot tougher, because there is no way around their armour. The upside is that you can skip a step in figuring out a melee (and you can skip the firefight segment entirely).

Hi Commander Karth,

I haven't got time to give a proper response at the moment but me and yorkie were working on an updated version of E40k and one of the things we did do was combine the assault and firefight stages together so that there would not be two seperate stages to close combat resolution.

The great thing about E40k is the fact that players can alter/change parts of the rules they have issue with and in most cases the rules will still work fine, it's a very adaptable flexible rule set that deserves more attention.

The flexibility of the detachments troop wise are also a feature i admire but is also the feature tournament players hated the most about these rules. But to each his own i say, play whatever version you enjoy and fits your purpose.

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Neat, I'd love to see what you and yorkie have come up with so far! I've never been much of a tournament gamer, to be honest. More often than not, I am the one running the game for my brother and me, so we tend to stick to friendly scenario based games and largely throw point costs out the window. I did the whole "gaming with strangers" thing in the FLGS with Warhammer Fantasy before (over a decade ago, now) and really found it was not for me—it's a lot more fun to put all your toys on the table and come up with crazy scenarios!

I'll try and put up our CC mods later for you.

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I always saw the firefight option in Epic40k as an equalizer for units that didn't or couldn't survive getting stuck in and a very valuable tool. A fast-moving detachment could move up, win a firefight (causing a little damage and leave a blast marker) and with a little luck zoom away. I've played Fog of War scenarios where 500 points of jetbikes and aspect warriors held back 2,000 points of Chaos demons by darting forward, nibbling away and breaking detachments and then zipping away. It's just an ideal way to snipe at your opponent. Not saying I am against integrating the two, but I think an interesting mechanic would be lost.

I am starting to see it in a similar way, actually. Although the rules allow for close assaults followed by firefights, it seems that an either/or situation is much more likely. This is because the loser in an assault will always flee beyond firefight range for the turn, thus making a firefight after an assault impossible. You could still firefight nearby detachments that you did not assault, of course, and maybe there is something to be said for overlapping fields of fire and "defense in depth" tactics.

I agree then that firefights are really more of an alternative to close assaults. For assaulting armies, the potential to be driven off by a firefight is much the same as the chance to have regular movement halted by enemy snap fire. The attacker really has to plan the assault move carefully so that they do not end up a centimeter or two short of base contact (thus trigerring a firefight instead of an assault).

Nevertheless, the rules for firefights still seem a tiny bit clunky, at least in comparison to the rules for assaulting. I mean, mechanically assaults and firefights fill much the same niche—they both are used ro drive off and destroy the enemy. Yet firefights do not do this nearly as well as assaults, largely because you are limited to causing a single hit and you are less likely to run down the fleeing enemy. They seem like a poor man's close assault, which is perhaps the intention of the rules?

I have also softened to the "roll one die" method of resolving close assaults (or firefights, for that matter). It is definitely swingy, but ultimately the opposed die roll is merely to establish the disposition of the fight, not to determine the outcome entirely. The disposition provides the "to Hit" numbers for dealing damage in melee, but it still comes down to making those to Hit rolls to inflict casualties. The nice thing about the single die disposition roll is that it incorporates blast markers and differences in combat abilities very succinctly, yet it doesn't determine everything about the close combat (leaving combat casualties up to tactics). For example, if you really want to kill an enemy command stand, then you can charge in with your infantry from the front of the formation, neutralize the control zones of the enemy's frontline units, and them charge cavalry from the rear of your formation deep into enemy lines (bypassing the first line of combat) and catch the HQ unit unawares. Even if you lose the assault, two of your stands will usually have a 5+ each to kill their target.

I totally forgot to post those CC mods for you Commander Karth, my apologies i'll try and do that over the weekend.

Please prompt me if i should forget again.

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No worries! I had also forgotten about this, but I am still interested in seeing them!

I'm an old proposer of combining the two, but don't feel strongly. You wouldn't lose firefights as a feature, because they would just be an assault where no units touched. It would basically be using firepower instead of 1 for support in close assaults, so you'd need something else for units with Support (was that the name of the ability?) to do.

I tried a few assaults in last night's game, with the original rules (tweaked for 6" hexes). I had some jetbikes close assault some landspeeders, more than doubly outnumbering the defenders. I had a psyker, and we were tied on BMs. I chose to do a CC instead of FF because with the latter you can only do one hit and one BM (I think). I hoped to wipe them out. But even with all those benefits, one survived and retreated, from a roll where I rolled 1 less than my opponent. That surprised me, though I am not claiming it is broken at this point. I could have run it down in the next turn, before it rallied, but sent my units somewhere else, so that's part of the mix. And I had to account for the hex thing, so I let a retreat move be two hexes, and they could not be within one hex of enemy. If I'd thought of it more and spread out a bit, I could have caught any survivors.

I think I'll come around to being happy with this if I try using it more, learn to do it better, etc.

andy

Had much the same idea for firefights just use the units firepower or a 1 and resolve the CC as for a normal assault. Hits would be allocated to the closest unit then the next closest etc...

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moredakka and I have talked about this a little and I too wouldn't mind a house rule that just combined firefights and assaults. The only real reason for keeping them separate in my mind is to give Firepower focused armies (effectively Imperial Guard, if only because they are far worse at melee against every other army) a kind of close combat to engage in, yet limit it in such a way that it is not particularly destructive (only ever one hit and one Blast Marker). On the defense, Guard can overlap detachments to force enemies into Fiefights after the closer Guard detachment is routed from an Assault (i.e., the classic "defense in depth"). On the attack, Imperial Guard can use firefights to push enemies off objectives. In either case, Guard players have options for close combat, but these are all limited in their desrtuctive power. Perhaps the concern was to not allow the Guard to be too deadly in close combat... That was the job of Titans, Khorne War Engines and Eldar Aspect Warriors.

Nevertheless, considering that every army has decent Assault scores except Guard (and thus has little reason to prefer Firefights over Assaults), I don't think that one army is sufficient cause to justify an entirely different type of close combat. If I recall, moredakka's solution has every base within 15cm rolling an attack die in close combat. We might need some playtesting to find out if that makes close combats too deadly (it can be a 5x to 10x increase in the number of attack dice rolled in combat, in some cases). Must the to Hit table be adjusted as well, or are we happy with (potentially) substantially more casualties? On the flipside, we should ponder if Heavy Weapons are really no better than average troopers in a firefight (if each stand not in base contact with the enemy merely contributes +1 support to the Assault total).

I think my main concern at the moment is the size of the dice variation compared to bonuses for doubling or even tripling the total of the enemy.

So I might just address that by taking the highest of two dice for each side. The totals will be higher, but the differences, while having the same possible range, will cluster lower.

I do wish firefight were more effective in terms of hits. And it doesn't make sense to me that some super heavy weapons just count as 1, even if they can do multiple hits. (If I'm remembering that right.)

I may want to come back to combining, but am not feeling the need at the moment.

andy

Roll 2d6 and take highest for each side was, if I recall corectly, something Jervis ended up adopting in his home games. At first I was skeptical about the by the book method, as 1d6 can be extremely swingy (even with a massive modifier like +3). Eventually I realized, however that this is no different than De Bellis Antiquitatis (the basic range of bonus modifiers is even the same). I can hardly criticize DBA/DBM's combat mechanic, when it has been so well received by historical gamers for decades.

More importantly though, the 1d6 combat roll is there to make Fate cards shine. Fate cards allow you to control the randomness of the battle, but only at a few key moments of your choosing. Do you spend the Fate card now, or save it for a critical moment in the future? What would the game have been like, in retrospect, if you saved the card for that more important roll later on? That limited amount of control in a sea of chaos is what makes games like Kriegspiel what they are. In general, Epic 40k is much more in the line of Kriegspiel et al. than it is in the line of usual GW games. That's not a bug; it's what makes it one of the best GW games published!

It's easy to rationalize as well. Why should your Khorne berserker legions defeat my Imperial Guard in every close assault? Epic 40k is epic scope—we frankly don't know what happens between individual footsloggers on the ground level. If the Imperial Guard miraculously win out, you can assume some daring feats of heroism took place. The fact that E40k "doesn't care" about the nitty gritty details is what makes it Epic, at least for me!

I definitely want a swing, and max of 2d6 gives the same range for the swing. The same results can happen.

But it feels to me that the swing is a bit too high relative to +2 for doubling the close combat value of the enemy.

In DBA, you are rolling for one element at a time. In Song of Blades and Heroes, you're doing a figure at a time. In E40K assaults, whether CC or FF, you're settling a big fight for quite a number of units. Maybe one detachment is the equivalent of an element or a figure in those games, but I found that I was too hesitant to attack when I "only" doubled the enemy's combat effectiveness. Your example of DBA is good, because it made me think of that and SoBH, both of which I like. I do want some unexpected results, just not so prominent.

Of course, none of this is about which method is "correct". Just my opinions, those of someone who has played one game in the last X years. I think X is about the age of Epic A.

andy