Indeed, although everyone in the UK tournament scene plays it the way Rug describes, I think by RAW it should probably be played in the manner Chroma describes?

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Currently doing a plastic scenery kickstarter

No, from the 2008 FAQ

Ah good to have that settled, I'd been quite worried I'd been cheating for years after Chroma raised the possibility.

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Currently doing a plastic scenery kickstarter

Well there ya go!  BANG BANG!

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"EPIC: Total War" Lead Developer

Now living in Boston... any EPIC players want to meet up?

Deathstrike FAQ as I've still got the pdf open!

That's the only FAQ which mentions deathstrikes.

I seem to recall a forum discussion about the empty DS taking the suppression and that the consensus opinion was that it can. I don't think its in an official FAQ though

(revenge time for Chroma  )

Suppression is based on "in range" and "line of fire", not whether the weapon can actually shoot or not (e.g. purely FF units *can* be counted as suppressed); we played it that only Infantry units that 'have' the Autocannon actually have "in range" and "line of fire", so they're the only ones that could be suppressed, reducing shots.  The Deathstrike Launched unit still has an "unlimited" range weapon on its datafax, even if it's been fired, so, it can be suppressed... odd, but true.

Seems that all the Infantry units have some kind of "phantom" 45cm range, so they can be suppressed... just seems odd to me... so, oddities abound.

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"EPIC: Total War" Lead Developer

Now living in Boston... any EPIC players want to meet up?

This may be what you where thinking of Rug

Anyone ever consider the possibility that AVs are ineffective because that's the case in real life?

It seems like the game is pulled in 2 directions. On one side you have the need to make the game seem plausible, so you have infantry and tanks generally acting like infantry and tanks do in the real world. On the other side is the need to make the game futuristic and fantastical, where giant walking war robots might actually be practical and every race in the universe has the same discrete progression in unit sizes.

One result of this (in my opinion) is that AVs used as main battle tanks get the short end of the stick. Infantry are slow and soft, but they are cheap and can produce more dice in an engagement than the same number of points of tanks. This means that that act like infantry do in the real world (more or less) and they will own the tanks most of the time. On the other end of the spectrum are the War Engines, which are far tougher than anything that actually exists in real life. They're called land battleships, but you could sink a fleet of battleships with the firepower it takes to kill a warlord (or maybe it just seems that way sometimes).

Meanwhile, tanks are better at shooting and are tougher than infantry - but both those attributes are easily nullified. Shooting is nice and all, but if you don't have enough firepower to break a target formation, then shooting is clearly inferrior to engagements. Having a good save is nice too, except there tend to be as many MWs on the table as there are AVs (or maybe it just seems that way sometimes) so those saves don't get used.

Finally, and independent of the other points mentioned above, is the fact that E:A is generally played with fewer units than games of E:SM/TL. When you're playing with fewer models to begin with, one logical result is that you'll see less of everything compared to the days of yore when tabletops had more models than terrain and you still believed that if you started working out next week, you could be like batman in a year.

So what is the solution? Well, first, adjusting some point costs is the most straight forward thing to do. In the long run, though, it may be useful to think of what would make a main battle tank worth taking given the rules of the game. Giving the Leman Russ an extra FF attack could make sense from a realism POV, while giving gunwagons an extra shooting attack (I'm thinking big shoota) or an extra CC attack (to represent all those weird things orks put on their vehicles). Maybe simply having more 'disrupt' shooting weapons would work, as that would allow faster generation of BMs on target formations without increasing the kill rate (similar to how an assault can break a formation without doing much actual damage).

Basically, the level of shooting needs to be raised to be competitive with engaging, or assault abilities need to be increased. But this needs to be done only on those units that need such a boost. Tansport AVs are good as-is, and artillery and aircraft AVs have their own (independent and different) issues.