I just got Hoss, Oksana, Wolf, and the equipment cards in the mail (just a little excited). I have a problem that with the hand to hand weapons. There are equipment packs and tokens that just don't make sense to me at all. I need some help understanding, I have searched the rule book through and through to find the answer but I cannot find anything. Am I missing it. What is the advantage of hand to hand weapons.

I understand that characters like Eva have powerful HtH weapons, but what about the characters that have powerful range but weak HtH? What is the point of that? There range can attack at melee distance so there seems to be NO advantage. I know that HtH can attack through doors but that only applies to one map and really is not that much of an advantage. So what is the purpose? Here are the examples that bother me the most:

Barry Brown - Why does he have a knife and the most powerful gun in the game? So he can be put on overwatch with a knife? I don't think so.

Wolf - He also has a knife. Why on earth would someone use an attack that uses 4 die instead of 5?

Eva Kramer bonus/winter pack - Why do the snow goggles allow her use the pistol as a melee attack? That doesn't make any sense to me, she can already attack the same distance? I would rather use her whip.

M5 special - bonus token in hoss pack for commando alphas - It does not take up and equipment slot and gives the trooper a HtH weapon. What is the point if he has a vastly superior gun?

There may be others but these are the ones that stood out to me. I know the attack through doors thing, but that really does not seem like that much of an advantage, nothing I would change a weapon over. And I know that Yula can destroy weapons, but again, that event doesn't happen enough to make it worth a whole other weapon.

Am I missing something? Is there some important rule or strategy that I am completely missing? If you can shed any light on the subject I would be grateful because I can't seem to find anything.

Tannhauser 1.0 required that you have an H-to-H weapon to attack an adjacent character, but Tannhauser 2.0 eliminated that requirement. So, non many are superflous, the onlw reason to cary on is to have a spare weapon, should you loose your first one, but that doesn't happen often.

There may be future changes or scenarios that render firearms usless forcing H-to-H combat, I know I have made custom "ability" tokens that force such a situation for a turn or two.

Ps, Yula can destroy a weapon almost every attack, I know I've lost tones of equipment to the Kruger, whenever my wife uses her.

some characters can do more damage with melee, especially if your playing the reich, i use mele a lot, it also screws around with you oponent as he is not always prepared for you to rush in, as mia said yula is beasty with it, and so is the strosstupen

Like I said before I understand if the character has a powerful HtH and a weak range. But unless the specific HtH weapon gives it plus to dice or additional powers (which several do), there is NO advantage to having a HtH weapon. It does not make sense for a character to have a powerful range and a weak HtH. To me it seems to be wasting an equipment slot, which I either use a bonus token or a different pack. It just does not seem well thought out to me.

Now, if they had kept a minimum distance of two spaces away for a range attack it would make sense to include a HtH for some characters. Since the new rules got rid of that, the base advantage for a HtH is gone. I feel that there needs to be some base advantage for HtH for certain tokens and packs to be worth it.

Well i use spare melee weapon (like when wolf has a knife) and give it to stosstruppen (with command pack) so he can have +3 dice on HtH combat. Otherwise they are useless, that's one of the main complains to the new rules (however they are still better than the old rules)

Well, you can exchange them for bonus tokens. But the thing about HtH weapons is they are the only ones allowed in failed bull-rushes. So Barry can serve the purpos of being a blocker when he's equipped with the combat pack. His stamina 6 makes it pretty hard to bull-rush him and if someone tried and failed then Barry will go cut-cut with his knife.

Oh yeah I always forget the free melee rule.

I also find that the HTH weapons are good for balancing out the packs by giving an item that isn't very good but not completely useless. Like you said, Barry gets the best gun in the game. So he can have that and a grenade, or that and a healing kit. His final tokens of course are either a tiny stamina boost or a HTH wep. they're basically superfluous. To not give him as many tokens as the other basic characters would be silly, but to give him a second grenade or healing kit would be ridiculous.

Just to add to whats already been said. I would say that basic HtH weapons like the knife are far from worthless. If an enemy character lacks a HtH weapon you can make a bull rush attempt with out much fear of any thing negative happening even if you fail the test. But if that same enemy character has a knife it would make me think twice before I attempted to bull rush them.

Stosstruppen's combat pack gives him another HtH weapon - that make no sense to me. It should be solved somehow...

Regarding other characters I would consider two small tweaks to the rules:

1) Attacking with HtH gives you always best combat value

And/or:

2) Defender gets lowest value of stamina in shock roll

This is ~as in Tannhauser Rules v1.

I think when standing next to your opponent it's harder to aim with machine gun... We could also assume that all Tannhauser characters are well trained in HtH combat, that's why they would use their highest combat values as in point 1).

What do you think?

[Edit:]

"Attacking with HtH gives you always best combat value" would work only with basic combat knife in this case

Even though a HtH weapon may seem superfluous, I think is much coherent with the soldiers' (military) equipement: it's realistic. The range weapons may be deny between adjacent characters (like the rules 1.0), but in this case the game would be imbalanced.

A weak weapon (or a not too usefull equipement) may be changed with bonus token easely.

@Falco : you can't give the knife to stosstruppen, 'couse all his slots are occupied with both command/stamina pack. With combat pack if you want give a knife to stosstruppen, he may free the slot with his knife before (and that haven't sense); with stamina pack Stosstruppen haven't free slots (and he cannot free anyone) before dying, after that you can give him up to 3 HtH weapons (try to give him Kruger or eva' strife, or both... he would be powerfull but he have only 3 healt point).

karop said:

I don't think a hand-to-hand combat is easyer than click a gun-trigger, moreover I think a HtH combat would be more difficult when the character is wounded: a man with a bullet in his body (or just hurted) fight hardly.

...why would a defender get lowest stamina value? Is he less trained, or slower than the attacker?

I agree with the last rules.

I also think, that melee weapons are quite weak.

but there is also a second advantage that they have (additional to the free melee attack):

side 17 of the rulebook says: ... the only exeptions to this is hand to hand attacks... they can attack targets on the other side of a door, regardless of line of sight ( but must be adjacent)...

karop said:

Since it gives him more attack dice. You know his special object, tainted arm has the special ability that for every HtH weapon he is carrying he gets on more dice when attacking with the tainted arm (the arm also counts). So in combat pack he has 6 attack dice, in stamina 5 and in command he starts with 6 but the Kempfer Bösse doesn't take up a equipment slot so if you give him a third HtH-weapon he starts slicing with 7 dice.

Doesn't a hand to hand weapon give you 4 dice in close combat, whereas if you don't have one, you only get 2?

I'd say thats pretty good

The time you're going to notice the difference is in Capture the Flag mode when you have Barry blocking the flag - not many successful bull rushes are going to get past him.

H2H weapons are pretty useful when we play a scenario with limited ammo for guns

- for each Pistol or Automatic weapon equipped, roll 1D6 during setup: value = how many shots that weapon can take.

- place tokens = value on each Pistol or Automatic card/token (such as: www.litkoaero.com/products/Ammo-Tokens-%2815%29.html )

- when a weapon is out of ammo, it cannot fire. Token is not removed, but can be discarded as normal if disposable.

- when a Pistol or Automatic weapon is equipped from a crate, roll 1D6 to determine how much ammo it has with it.

- 'Extra Ammunition''s ability instead resets a gun's ammo to a value of 6.

- Ozo's 'Doom' Luger is magic & has unlimited ammo

klarlack said:

We take this to be a very important rule, especially because it comes before the later one saying that you can attack any adjacent character (with no mention of path).

To review:

P17: "Two characters who share a path can always see each other... ...The only exception to this is Hand to Hand attacks. Hand to Hand attacks may target a character on the other side of a door, regardless of Line of Sight. The target must still be in an adjacent circle."

P21: "A legal target must either share a path with the attacker or be on an adjacent circle unless special rules or equipment allow unusual targets or prohibit normal legal targets... ...To choose an adjacent target, no there is no equipment requirement."

Since the rule on P17 mentions sight restrictions except for Hand to Hand attacks, and the rule on P21 does not mention sighting- We take that sight being a requirement is taken to be understood on P21.

Basically we play- and I believe is how it is intended- that if a character is attacking with a ranged weapon, they cannot attack off path, they must use a melee weapon. This has happened a few times, and has been a big boon for the voivodes in the Castle as well as the Labyrinth.

(in the castle this always happens at doors, and so we've termed any of these intersections as doors)