Wow !! What a response ! But surprisingly one sided.
No disrespect to anyone, but i think many are missing the point of my suggestion. No one is suggesting assaults should be a sure thing.
(and i'm not suggesting the rules should be changed - it is just a possible house rule i thought worth discussing.)
I don't disagree that luck is luck - can't change that in a dice based game - AND : yes this reflects real life battles. Great ! I want the chance to come up with a beautifully considered tactic, get the 4+/5+ and sweep my enemy away a glorious slaughter AND I also want the chance of the heroic last stand coming through with Micheal Caine yelling at zulus/orks etc. (that's why i don't like option B - average rolls - it keeps the really unlucky results and smooths out the middle ground - boring.)
But at the end of the day, this isn't real life. Its a game. And to win the major factor should be skill not luck. Generally EpicEA gets this right, but occasionally the assault resolution throws things completely out of whack.
Ulrik summed it up perfectly :
Ulrik wrote:
If you play 3 or 4 turns, and then the game is decided by a dice roll at the end, it's a crappy game. It's a shitty, bad game.
In my situation i originally posted, we had played for 2 hours, 1 and half of which i had been playing catch up (brilliantly imho
) following some poor judgement and luck in the first turn. It come down to the wire, i spring the trap that would have carried us into turn 4, and a probable enjoyable draw and instead it didn't work. With (as i remember it) a 4+ bonus going in, loosing would have been unlucky. Getting wiped out to the man, loosing the chance to contest the objective and my BTS gave an auto win on
one dice roll. It turned a hard fought and exciting game into a disappointment - we both felt cheated. Me of a fighting chance, he of a legitimate victory. He even suggested we reset and re-fought the assault...
Now, we both understood how ridiculously unlikely this result was. We both accept there should be a chance to win even a "dead cert." We both know the rules a have been play tested for ages - that's why i was surprised this hadn't been debated before (afaik.)
The problem was just the
hack down hits - they seem disproportionately large compared with the hits gained in the actual assault. Therefore suggestion A. was to limit them to what someone had "earned" (as much as is possible.)
If in the same situation my proposed house-rule was in place, i had been defeated, broken and forced to retreat (and auto-lost one more unit as that was the bonus my opponent had gained) - it would have been a very bad position for the Aspect Warriors. They would have been battered, broken for a turn and assuming they rallied (on a 4+) still half suppressed going into turn 4 - but my opponent would still have had to play well to exploit it and get a major victory. That would have been fun.
I appreciate this doesn't seem to be causing a major problem in most games. Though like Ulrik i'm surprised no one sees the theoretical problem here. As far as i can see i have only heard mathematical argument against this, which was hinted at by fredmens :
fredmans wrote:
Initiating assaults to break the enemy/cause losses is way more efficient than ranged shooting, but it comes with that one significant drawback, you put your own formation at risk./Fredmans
As another opponent of mine pointed out - if you loose the possibility of complete disaster out of the equation, then assault-weighted armies would disproportionately benefit,i f you assume their points values already reflect this extra risk. I'm not sure you could ever actually factor this into the lists because to do so would benefit them massively in the 99% of assaults where luck is fairly evenly spread. In any case, as we have only played SMs, Eldar and IG the number of assaults seem
fairly similar for each.
Anyway, it think we may play test it for kicks, will let you all know how it goes.
