Why Shooting Into Combat Sounds Fun… Until You Build an Army Around It
Sometimes our army-building chats start with a list idea, and sometimes they spiral into one of those classic “okay, but what would this do to the whole game?” discussions. This time it was all about a tempting question: should shooting into combat be allowed more broadly?
The spark for the conversation came from our recent games and from thinking about how certain battlefield situations feel versus how they actually work in the rules. On paper, being able to fire into an ongoing melee can sound immersive. If a unit is right there, directly in front of the guns, why shouldn’t we be able to take the shot?
But the more we talked it through, the more we ended up on the side of: no, the restriction is probably doing more good than harm.
The cheap-unit problem
One of the first things we landed on was how quickly this kind of rule could be exploited with very cheap units.
As Stas pointed out, if shooting into combat became widely available, it would be very easy to start throwing disposable units into fights just to control enemy shooting and limit your own losses. In the most extreme version, everyone would start behaving a bit like Skaven — not necessarily because it fits their faction identity, but because it would simply be efficient.
And not even with big sacrificial blocks. The really nasty version would probably be tiny, very cheap units whose whole job is to tag something in combat and cap the damage incoming from shooting. If a volley of 20 shots can only ever kill a handful of models because of how engagement works, then suddenly those little throwaway units become absurdly valuable.
That is exactly the kind of rule interaction that starts as a cool cinematic idea and ends as a list-building distortion.
Tactical depth, but in a weird way
What made this conversation interesting is that we didn’t dismiss the current restriction as just arbitrary. Quite the opposite.
Stas said something we found very convincing: this limitation doesn’t really flatten the tactical layer — it deepens it.
In our last game, charging goblins into clanrats was worthwhile not only because of the fight itself, but also because it effectively hid them from jezzails. Even though, visually, they were basically right in front of the barrels.
That disconnect can feel a little strange from an immersion standpoint, and we definitely get the instinct to want a more “realistic” solution. But from a gameplay perspective, it creates meaningful decisions:
- when to commit cheap units,
- when to screen with combat instead of positioning,
- when to protect key pieces by forcing awkward target priorities,
- and when to accept that some guns simply won’t get to shoot the ideal target.
That’s not always intuitive, but it is strategically rich.
Our games are not exactly speed chess anyway
One argument that didn’t convince us as much was the one about game speed and flow.
Stas was pretty clear here: our games are not exactly hyper-dynamic to begin with, so the claim that allowing more shooting into combat would automatically ruin pacing didn’t hit especially hard. In theory, you could probably write a version of the rule that stays simple and fast enough in practice.
There was also a funny comparison from Michał: apparently tournament games of Kings of War at 2300 points are, by definition, played in under an hour. That really highlights how much game systems differ in what they optimize for.
Still, even if speed alone isn’t the killer argument for us, the bigger issue remains that the whole rules framework is already built around the assumption that combat protects units from most shooting.
Once you start pulling on that thread, a lot of other things need to be rebalanced.
The system is built around the restriction
And that was probably the strongest conclusion from the whole exchange.
Even if we can imagine a more immersive version of battlefield shooting, allowing units to fire into combat would create more problems than it solves, because so many parts of the game are designed around the opposite assumption.
That includes:
- unit roles,
- target safety,
- screening,
- sacrificial charges,
- shooting efficiency,
- and faction-specific exceptions.
In other words: this is not a small tweak. It would be a foundational rewrite.
Why it’s also good for faction identity
A nice side effect of this restriction is that it gives designers room to make specific armies feel special.
We ended up appreciating that this limitation helped create interesting rules for Skaven in particular. If most armies can’t casually shoot into their own combats, then the factions that get to bend that rule immediately stand out more.
Michał also noted that, in Skaven, this is currently limited enough that it’s not the absolute core of the army’s identity anyway — more like a flavorful tool than the single defining mechanic. One unit can shoot into its own troops, one unit can tie things up and be shot at, but it’s not like the whole army functions only through that gimmick.
That feels about right to us. Enough to make the rats feel like rats, but not so much that the entire game has to revolve around it.
So what does this mean for army-building?
For us, the takeaway is pretty practical.
When building lists, it’s worth remembering that combat is not only damage and board control — it is also protection from enemy shooting. Cheap units don’t just redirect or screen through placement; they can also manipulate what is and isn’t a legal target once the lines connect.
That makes expendable infantry, fast throwaway units, and awkward little chargers more valuable than they might first appear.
And if we’re on the receiving end of that kind of play? Well, as Stas summed it up perfectly:
artillery will have to be enough :)
Which, honestly, is a very respectable conclusion.
Final thought
We started from a very natural hobby instinct — wouldn’t it be cooler and more immersive if guns could fire into ongoing melees? — and ended up appreciating why the answer is mostly no.
Not because the cinematic version has no appeal, but because the current limitation creates real tactical choices, supports faction flavor, and stops the game from collapsing into a weird world of micro-units heroically (or cynically) jumping into fights just to game the shooting phase.
And once we noticed that, it stopped feeling like an artificial restriction and started feeling like one of those quiet rules that does a lot of heavy lifting in army-building.