hand to hand fight units

We have to remember here guys, realism isn't a core value in the design of this game.

While if we were being realistic Close Combat would be very situational and nearly useless in most circumstances (Baring a unforseen improvement to personal armor/shields).

Thing is, the rule of cool seems more applicable here. Swords? close range Flamers? Why the hell not! I mean these are robots, much less vulnerable to mere bullets.

Most likely any units and/or strategies involving this would have to be High Risk/Reward.

I personally think that combined melee and range battles would be cool and interesting. Imagine meeting an enemy army on the field of battle with a charge of fast and deadly melee bots keeping the enemy occupied while the ranged hang back and fire away.

(one problem is how would you control a group of melee bots effectively, maybe area commands?)

All it takes is a little chaff-smoke to send everything into melee range.

hand-to-hand i certainly have to agree would be interesting but also agreed that only really in SC the moment you put range units that can move as well as shoot makes a problem for any hand-to-hand unit and allows the range unit to basicly kite them (move back, shoot, move back, shoot)

However I do think that the idea of maby a couple of stealth based hand-to-hand units would be very very interesting. The idea of suddenly having a few high damage hand-to-hand units within your group of units waiting to defend your area would certainly make me painc!

Any thoughts on that?

You could have the Close Combat being very fast or have a charge 'ability'. If units had a slow enough turn rate (of turrets and weapon systems) you could open up the ability to flank effectively (ie, have a reason to do so other than to control some important location).

Imagine a group of tanks are moving towards your base. You could have some CC bots run around to the side/behind of the tanks and be out of range, then run in from behind. Tanks can't fire immediately as they have to turn to target. CC Bots can close the distance then unleash the damage. If you just charge straight into the Tanks the CC Bots would get destroyed/heavily damaged before they reach the tanks.

This could effectively set up ambushes as well, if the enemy doesn't realize you have the bots hidden nearby this would be way more effective.

So the CC bots would have:
low Health
high speed - (could have a charge 'ability' and less speed, so they would have to 'commit' to a fight)
fairly high DPS.

Why can't the bots of the game have close attack weapons as well as guns?

Why can't the bots hit each other with whatever guns they carry, or kick each other?

Maybe they have light sabres in the their robo pockets?

Everyone is thinking too small.

Consider the Dawn of War series where most infantry can get down and dirty in combat.

You get a .22LR hunting rifle, and I'll weld a sword onto the front of an M1 Abrams (target area is the middle of some salt flats with no cover for a few km wither way). Let's see who wins

That's an extreme circumstance, definitely, however we have already developed armour that requires some fairly specialist ammunition to defeat. Fast forward to the future and who's to say that along with heavy armour, there isn't available short range weaponry (flamethrower, shotgun analogue, monofilament blade, plasma cutter etc.) that might make a short ranged / mêlée unit viable?

The difficult part is in the balance, like any unit. Convention would suggest that it would need to be high power (to balance the short range), and some combination of HP and speed that would mean that it stands a chance of getting in to range, but is not overpowered and can be neutralised with skill and/or luck. I'm thinking maybe a light tank unit with some plasma cutters on the front, which is effectively a ramming unit. You could add a rocket booster effect for the closing run (i.e. a charge attack), so that they aren't overly quick or agile all the time, they need to line up first, and they stand a chance to miss on the charge if the target is agile.

That would put it in the remit of a T2 upgrade for the light tank, sacrificing range for (potential) damage. A proper physics engine could also add in some potential comedy as well... rocket boosted tanks that didn't pick up on the small hill (ramp) between them and the target? :mrgreen:

This is the first interesting thing i've seen from the Melee unit camp. I kinda like the idea of a unit with two big boosters that, upon spotting a unit, dashes forward and attacks.

You want stuff like that?

What about mega-armour, or jump-jets, or teleporters, or age of empires huskarls?

Let me flip that around then and ask if the person with the hunting rifle would bother with a melee weapon against the tank? If it was tank vs tank with no infantry would you still bother with the sword?

Infantry with melee weapons, and all the examples from warhammer etc. assume the opponents are living creatures. When all the oponents are metallic, heavily armoured machines, mellee is pretty much irrelevant unless you want to start simulating wrestling. But even that would only be a method to allow actual explosive weapons to destroy the target.

Buzzsaws. Laser swords.

Honestly, using BattleMallet 38k as a "realistic" example is pretty absurd...

As has been pointed out. The only way a Melee unit would work is if it could get close to the enemy without dying... There are several ways that have been mentioned:

1 - Heavy armor. If it takes two shots to kill him, and you only get one off, then your in trouble.

2 - Stealth. They flanked you, and your units couldn't turn fast enough to attack them.

It really all comes down to the technology of "Handwavium." Anyone could come up with "real" reasons for this or that to work.... An asteroid hitting a planet could be considered "unrealistic" if you consider the power and accuracy of railguns... But it all comes down to "Epicness" in the end...

I, personally, think hand-to-hand units are epic....

Half of the sci fi genre is buried in plausibility. While TA may have stretched reality to support a universe of kill bots (and hell, doesn't any sci fi story do that?), it didn't explicitly break off into fantasy or anime land. Power can exist, harvesting can exist, constructors can exist, guns and nukes and killbots can all definitely exist. The only real breaks in science happened with the galactic gate (which justifies the Commander), and with the resource system (which makes the game playable). Neither of these breaks are really that critical, and the enjoyment they add is well worth ignoring the real world for a bit. It ultimately depends on how serious someone wants to be about these things.

By extension, melee units can also exist. We know their purpose and how they work. The trick is creating and supporting them in a way that makes sense and allows good actions in game. Creating them is going to be the most difficult thing, because it involves making intricate skeletons and complex 3D animations for their attacks.

what about units who carry in one hand a short ranged/ medium damage weapon that run to the ennemy and then kill him with a plasma sword in the other hand?. So they can also be "defensive" units with guns

TA wasn't really based in anime. Gun&blade action is really more of a Gundam phenomenon.

Multi weapon units take away from the specialized nature of these refined kill bots. The added complexity only makes the unit more expensive without necessarily adding useful power, so it will lose out against dedicated forms. It's best to keep any single design simple, and use new mechanics as opportunities to create new units. Complexity will occur between many simple units as a matter of course.

There is one exception to the rule, and that's the Commander. The Comm, as a solitary unit, has to contend with a huge number of roles and threats in the course of its invasion. It HAS to be flexible because it would not be able to survive otherwise.

What about ships?

Ships will melee each other with gigantic cranes.

a sword is never going to be as good a weapon as other potential close combat weapons.

at the end of the day they all just boil down to ranged weapons with effectively zero range, like a plasma stream of som sort.

or a chainsaw?

is it some sort of laser and/or plasma chainsaw?

you could always just create a mod for this