Motivated by the hope that FFG might revise and expand the ground combat system, let's make a thread that gathers all the issues anyone can find with it. Please feel free to add any that jumped out at you and that I didn't think to include. This thread is intended to gather as many as possible.
I want to keep this thread as easy to read and clean as doable, so please, do not use this thread to propose house rulings that would solve any of these issues, make a thread in the House Rules for that instead. Also, if you think that any of the things mentioned here isn't an issue at all or disagree with opinions on the rules you find here, please trust in the FFG staff being able to decide which issues actually matter and which don't for themselves instead of derailing the thread with the discussion of a particular issue.
As a note, some of the stuff brought up here may already have been mentioned by the rules as being dependant on ad hoc GM decisions. I feel that GM Fiat isn't suited for ruling on many of the things mentioned here. Leaving rules up to ad hoc decisions by the DM should be reserved for stuff that is heavily mutable, situation dependant, and involves stuff that would be hard to predict by rules. The problem mentioned here do not fall under this, most of them are stuff that PCs will need to know from the get go and be able to depend on in order to be able to plan future actions. Saying "it should happen at the speed of plot/depend on the story the GM wants to tell" is dependent on there being a plot, instead of plot being something that naturally arises from PCs, NPCs, and the rules interacting with each other in interesting ways and thus is not helpful in solving any of the issues mentioned here.
Some issues have already been mentioned and I will repeat them here, but I want to begin with the one that jumped out most to me during playtesting the system as written.
Issues:
1. More rules to help create/rule on flashpoints! Right now, the biggest problem with playing was that combat felt utterly uninvolved, even when PCs were embedded in units and used as many different combat actions to get boni as possible. An easy list that gives guidelines on how many points of damage/mali to enemy units/boni to friendly units skilltests during flashpoints should be worth based on how hard they are and how many are done would be easy and immensely free up gametime for players to think up cool stuff to do. Thinking up adequate results for flashpoints the PCs thought up was the most demanding and time consuming thing during playing, do not let this be based on "just make **** up/GM Fiat it". IMO Flashpoints have the potential to be the most important element that provides players with fun and engaging things in the system, they absolutely need more guidelines to allow quick and easy resolution. Flash Points need to be something the PCs can utterly depend on and plan for, instead of needing to hope for GM approval.
2. Integrate the ground war system with the rest of the rules. Describe how it interacts with certain talents, describe how it interacts with ship components. Now that we have ground war rules, we need to know more exactly what how many and what kind of units Barracks can hold. What unit strength is each dot of Launch bays worth in ground combat? Which command based checks are affected by the boni a unit's disposition towards the PCs provides to command? There are many more points that would make the system feel much more integrated with the whole. Right now, the rules float there in the void with basically no connection to the rest of the rules.
3. Make the Ground War rules more compatible with the Horde rules from Deathwatch! After using them during several RT sessions, the Horde rules are some of the greatest additions to the basic ruleset ever, making for really cool scenes. Some guidelines that allow extrapolating a ground unit’s stats if transformed into a horde and vice versa would be utterly fantastic. Again, please don't throw the old GM Fiat panacea at this!
4. More Orders! Especially orders that a) allow one unit to help another without personally having go into attack range of opposing units, b) Orders for things like units trying to make sneak attacks or infiltrate behind enemy lines c) Orders that allow PCs without being specialized in war situations (the Missionary in our game could only do Feint maneuvers, the RT basically could only help with flank Orders rolled against his inferior Common Lore (War) ).
5. Right now the rules only seem to give acquisition roll guidelines for units the RT tries to train and equip himself. Provide some example guidelines for the comparative prizes and drawbacks of hiring mercenaries or acquire IG units. Yes, I know they already provided the old GM fiat escape hatch for that, but I honestly believe that particular 'just make **** up' approach should be reserved for higher level units like Sororitas, Astartes, Titans and similar types of units. FFG is has a tendency of being way too quick in pushing the weight of settling these kinds of situations onto the GM's shoulders.
6. Update skill advance lists to account for the new rules. Thanks to the way ground war rules, many skills (and soon hopefully some talents as well) have gotten heightened roles and importance they didn't have when the corebook was written.
Scholastic Lore (Tactica Imperialis) for example has gotten a lot more important now; don't just go "eh, Rogue Traders aren't supposed to have any idea of tactics anyway". Update career paths to make more classes able to participate in the new encounter type.
7. A unit's damage potential being independent of its size. I put this in the list because other people have criticized it, though I personally don't think that's really one of the problems, as the basic rules work out to same numbers of people doing the same number of damage dice to each other, no matter how they are organized. It only becomes a problem when one side makes their units so small, that damage overflow from the big unit means it wastes a lot of its damage potential while the smaller ones deal 100% of their combined damage to it. Beginning at certain size differences between units in combat there should definitely be consequences on damage taken and given. Besides, I may well be wrong on not thinking of this as one of the bigger problems.
8. Armour scaling faster than damage, making upper tier units completely immune to damage. This has already been mentioned before as well, but it isn't just between Titans. Units specialized in damage against heavily armoured targets, like certain kinds of superheavy tanks, superheavy artillery, and some airborne units should definitely be able to get the capabilities to hurt even Titans.
9. More ways to customize units! Especially rules that allow units to specialize, i.e. become stronger against certain types of units or in certain situations but weaker in others. A simple increase and decrease in a unit's power depending on situation and attacked enemy would suffice for this. An armoured unit specialized in mowing down infantry should have a problem when faced with an armoured unit bristling with lascannons and assorted other anti armour weapons.
10. Attack is an Order listed in the sections describing order, but later it says that units in contact automatically deal damage to each other when it’s the turn of one of them. Which one is correct?
11. As written, the Charge action isn't actually a charge at all and doesn't allow you to damage an enemy unit at all and involves no movement of the charging unit. Which is confusing, it should be renamed to something that makes more sense for what it does, like Psychological Warfare.
12. The dig in Order provides no duration. Does dig in last a certain number of turns or until the unit moves?
13. Are there orders that would make you lose your 'digged in' status? Notably the following actions need to be cleared up on how they influence a unit's digged in status: Flank, Disengage (maybe requiring to basically reroll your digged in skill roll), charge, Feint. Also, clarify how order that provide movement interact with digged in.
14. This one is especially easy to fix: The rules give weapon ranges for Artillery and airborne units, but don't define anywhere what that actually means. The obvious thing would be that it allows doing attack actions against other units at that range, but attack actions are defined as both units rolling damage against each other, which doesn't make sense when artillery is attacking an infantry unit dozens of miles in the distance.
15. Does Push through only allow reaching the opposite site of the chosen enemy unit, or can you move the rest of your allotted movement distance as well?
16. The description of Taking Turns on page 131 talks about "any player embedded with a unit may also make extended actions to aid his unit". What are those extended actions, the rest of the rules don't refer to them anywhere. Are extended actions meant to be Flash Points or Orders (basically allowing units with embedded characters to make an additional Order/turn)?
17. Actual Orders, modifiers, and possible skill rolls that allow to take advantage of the stuff mentioned in the 'Catching your enemy with his boots off' sidebar. These are things PCs need to know from the get go and be able to depend on. They need to be able to incorporate these factors into long term tactics and strategies, maybe even base entire combat operations, campaigns or even character builds around. The factors called out in that sidebar are exceptionally important for warfare of nearly any kind. If player can't sit at home and think of cool ways of using them without calling up his GM after every single new idea and asking how he would rule that specific tactic would work in the rules that just reeks of wasted potential.