Warhammer 40K: New Close Combat Rules Revealed – Melee Movement Made Easy
Games Workshop is showing off how the Combat Phase is changing. Things are about to get interesting for Melee in Warhammer 40,000.
There’s a new edition coming in June and with that GW is updating things. Today, we’re getting a taste of the Combat Phase changes coming. Let’s see how melee is going to proceed in 11th edition!
Melee Engagement Ranges & Charging Update
The first change you’ll notice – engagement range is now 2” instead of 1”. If you’re within 2” of an enemy unit, you’re engaged with it, and you can’t finish a move within engagement range of an enemy without charging. Crucially, you CAN now move through an enemy model’s engagement range in the movement phase.
Keep in mind this is combined with the change to the charge roll rules. In 11th edition, you’ll roll the distance and then you’ll choose your target for the charge! As long as there’s at least one legal target within 12″ you can roll those dice to see what happens without declaring which unit you want to charge into.
The target of your charge must be within the distance that you rolled, measuring base to base, and if you can get within an inch when you move a model, you must do so – but if you can’t, you only need to move to be within engagement range. This means that charging around corners or into terrain becomes a far more forgiving endeavour, as your unit only need make it to within 2” of the enemy.
Advertisement
This really does open up a lot of options for charging units. Terrain should be less of an issue. But also this means charging seems to have gotten a lot easier in general. Terrain may still help limit how many models can make it into combat but that new 2″ engagement range does mean a lot more units can get into combat.
Ingress Moves & Pile Ins
An Ingress Move covers all sorts of those special deployment options. Think of things like Deep Strike or other moves from Strategic Reserves. In the current edition most of these require you to deploy more than 9″ away from enemy models. In 11th edition, that distance is dropping to 8″ instead.
This means that you still need to roll a 9 to successfully charge out of Deep Strike, but now your potential landing zones are larger, and you have much more flexibility to move your models around when the dice gods are kind.
Advertisement
Another tweak is being made to Pile In moves. These will be performed BEFORE the dice start rolling as opposed to how they happen now. The player who’s turn it is resolves all their Pile Ins first (this is still the typical 3″ shuffle) and then their opponent does the same thing. I think this is an interesting change and could take some getting used to for melee masterminds out there. Some of the things you could do to prevent units from getting hit or even getting INTO combat will need to revisited.
Fighting, Overruns, & Consolidations
Fighting works much the same as it did before – players alternate between units that are eligible to fight – but the order in which those units get to fight has changed. Most importantly, the player whose turn it is now gets to pick a unit first – including when fighters on both sides have the Fights First rule. This means that one of your units that Charged will get to strike before enemy units that have the Fights First rule.
In the example above the Red Units are the active player. They chose to use their Monster unit to activate which destroyed the Rhino and the Blue Sororitas unit has to make an emergency disembark. However, when it’s the Blue player’s turn, they don’t have anything in combat so they have to pass it back to the Red Player.
This allows the Red Chaos marines to activate since they were engaged with the Rhino as well. This is called an Overrun Fight and it allows for another Pile-in move to engage the unit that disembarked from the Rhino.
I do appreciate that GW took into consideration the “what if my engaged unit’s targets all got destroyed before they could attack.” That second pile-in will be very hand for those types of armies geared towards overwhelming melee assaults!
Once every eligible unit is done fighting, then the Consolidation moves happen. Similar to Pile In moves, these happen at the same time.
They can be used to manoeuvre further into combat, leap on an enemy unit within 3”, or dash to a nearby objective. But be careful when engaging a new enemy unit that hasn’t fought yet in that phase, as they’ll still get the chance to fight despite everyone else being done.
While leaping into the fray AGAIN might sound like a good idea, it will allow that unit to get to swing if they haven’t already fought this phase. You have been warned!
I think this might be Khorne’s favorite change!
