There are some interesting tricks you can pull with units that only have one attack capability.

I'm going to give an extreme example just to highlight how powerful this can be.

attacker has a devourer and a queen.

defender has a seige tank and two battlecruisers.

attacker sets the seige tank as the front line unit then plays improved flyer attack and spawn broodling.

the devourer can't hit the frontline seigetank but its power exceeds the tanks health so the supporting battle cruiser is destroyed triggering flying splash. spawn broodling kills the tank, and the flying splash is applied to the second battle cruiser.

In this example the zerg player had no possibility of loosing any units and the only way for the terran to save some of his units was for the tank to have 10 health.

There are many different combinations of this that can be done. For instance a reaver and a high templar could take down a corsair and two reavers by setting the corsair as the front line unit. The reavers attack exceeds the health value of the corsair killing one supporing reaver, using ground splash on the other reaver and ground/air splash from psy storm on the corsair. Again with no risk of losing anything.

There are a bunch more combinations but they all involve using an air only against a ground only in the front line(or vise versa) and then using an assist unit to kill whatever was in the front line.

spawn broodling/psy storm/plague/mind control/irradiate can all accomplish this.

You can defend against this by getting the defense module but you have to be aware of it first.

http://www.fantasyflightgames.com/edge_foros_discusion.asp?efid=6&efcid=1&efidt=38871&efpag=3

"Splash damage is only triggered if the attack from the standard combat card destroys the enemy unit. "

EDIT: I though it's impossible, but killing assists units ofc triggers Splash Damage. Sorry for confusing post, it's correct.

The attack from the standard combat card is killing the enemy unit.

I'll be more detailed.

one skirmish

front line devourer supporting queen.

front line tank 2x supporting battlecruisers

zerg plays improved flyer attack ( 9/8 flying splash) with spawn broodling

terran plays seige mode (9/8 ground splash)

devourer can't attack the tank but it can hit a supporting unit so its attack of 9 exceeding the health of 8 allows it to kill a supporting battlecruiser which triggers air splash damage.

spawn broodling kills the tank.

splash damage is applied killing the other battlecruiser.

I picked examples with splash to demonstrate the power of this but splash doesn't need to be involved for this air/ground dodge to still be good.

It's wrong. I think that splash damage should be triggered only then front line unit was destroyed.

Aba said:

Splash is triggered when your frontline unit makes a kill during the resolution of the skirmish. Doesn't matter if you kill an enemy front line unit or an enemy supporting unit.

I did once destroyed two battlecruisers with a single valkyrie! Special Mobilize rocks!

EMELT said:

Yes, I know that. I clearly said "should be".

That's a really hard one. Man, never thought of that. Really, really hits me. I will have to make sure to explain the "you can hit a supporting unit if not being able to hit the FLU" thing, so nobody can bow out with the excuse of having not known

Yeah this is definately an odd case. It isn't going to come up much but if you can spot it you can devastate someone.

I'll probably have to spend a half hour explaining it the first time I use it.... asuming I ever get the chance. It relies on the defender having a somewhat odd combination of units in a space.

I just noticed all this when I was trying to come up with ways of using mind control effectively, I realized you could bypass the frontline without losing your dark archon if it could only attack flyers. For instance send in a dark templar and a dark archon in against a valkerie and and a marine. Put the valk in the front line, dark templar kills the supporting marine and the valk survives to be mind controlled.

Hehe, and there's no chance he kills something himself, right?