Late question: what can my unit do when an enemy melee unit has engaged with them? My melee unit will be countered if I strike it first. My ranged unit will be Overwatch'd if it tries to run away from the enemy.

Thanks for the great mod! I like the idea that air units can easily attack enemy units in close combat as well.

thank you for these mods. i like to think that charging into guns would always be devestating but melee oriented futuristic military troops would also be armed and prepared to take gunfire with some sort of upside and counter measures with stuff like specialty armor or other sort of safety measures. it makes sense, thank you!

Awesome mod, thanks @RogueRifler

Updated for 1.404

Updated for 1.403

Updated for 1.402

3.5 The Vanguard in particular do not, but they have Overwatch on their T1 core, they have Targeting Field and they have the Steady Aim passive in addition to ample AoE stagger.

4. If you think that melee is interesting in the base game, more power to you. You don't have to use this mod. I just found that every time I played a melee faction, my light melee units were only useful if they staggered enemy units and were immune to staggers themselves. If they couldn't stagger their targets they just died. Given how many fun and interesting unit mods there are, it felt pretty lame that you needed 1-2 armor mods and a melee stagger mod on them to be useful in the end game.

I've played / modded this game for 1.5k hours and I can't imagine playing without it. If you don't like it, that's fine I don't need you to like my mod. Flinging around personal insults does nothing to further your claims, it honestly makes your post sound childish.

1. Overwatch does counter melee. It literally is first strike for ranged attacks. Yes, you can run around isolated instances of it, but a staggered formation of overwatch will cause significant casualties to an advancing melee force. Even engage traits like Skitter were designed such that their effects do not impact overwatch.

2. Knockback effects are countered by heavy units. There are many heavy melee units to choose from to deal with Trenchers. Also you can trigger their overwatch by moving and then issue your attack.

3. You are acting like stagger is now useless against melee. It's still great. The only difference is that the first instance of stagger a unit receives only deprives it of one attack, not two. Most factions also have additional CC effects that hard counter melee that bypass the Engaged in Melee trait.

Continued
I'm amused by how many of your "these are good CC that still counters melee" involved things who's ONLY CC effect was, in fact, Stagger. For instance, Vanguard Grenades, in fact, I'm not sure I recall ANY CC effects the Vanguard have that are not Stagger. Plenty of defensive buffs, plenty of ways to make an enemy easier to hit, but not really CC.

Honestly, I can't help but feel that you basically took all the interesting parts of using melee effectively and said "I don't want to engage with this" and took all of that out instead of doing something like, say, addressing the "melee units aren't actually meaningfully tankier than ranged units" problem. Though, even that is somewhat exaggerated in your video, since you are comparing a T1 melee to a T2 ranged unit.

mmmmm... I strongly disagree that "Overwatch hard counters melee". A. Overwatch is directional B. Overwatch is countered by stagger, and plenty of stagger is available from OPs, pulling Overwatch apart is one of the basic skills required to make basically any faction in the game work.

Further, ONE Dvar unit has a melee that knocks stuff back, admittedly, that one unit IS the Trencher, and the only other Dvar unit(not secret tech) with a melee attack has a concussion chance attached to it.

I had too much to say, so Imma have to post another.

Updated for 1.401

Updated for 1.4

Hinder was removed

Thanks for responding. It's good to know.

Of course! It is up to date as with all my other mods.

Does this mod still work?

Syndicate auto combat is just bad. I rarely have "significant" issues with vanguard, but even without Buffed Melee, Syndicate auto combat can lose your starting army to the first few encounters.

The particular issue with Xenoplague / Piggies is the Skitter ability, giving them basically perfect Evasion combined with engaged in Melee bonuses.

I'm all okay with your point about overwatch countering again your changes, but the AI aren't keen on using it, so you must do every battle manually, and there's also the fact that overwatch has hard counters too (gonna hate blinding huntress + beasties stacks...)

Tried a bit more, and shooter factions are deeeefinitely loosing fights they shouldn't in auto, but it extends to manual too.
There's also the fact that the melee dodge bonus you put in is kept out of melee by the units if you push them back, which makes them still tough to kill even when using abilities specifically meant to counter melee engagement (the indentured taser for example).
Maybe tweaking this specific part or add a purge on pushback/knockback abilities for your specific buff could help ?

Well that's exactly it - lastly played syndicate and vanguard ^^

@Theobald

What faction? I haven't personally had issues in that regard. I could see that for sector bases for the vanguard or syndicate because the tactical AI prioritizes using their short ranged abilities over their gun on their core troops.

This mod seems to make autocombat clearly favour melee units now (pig or xeno raiders routinely kill the entire garrison of a maxed sector)

So after some thought I don't think I would add that feature for a few reasons. Number one, it creates some weird tactical situations because your melee attacks are granting a positive buff to the unit you're attacking. For instance it would be beneficial to proc melee overwatch or attack your own unit in melee to gain a strong defense against ranged attacks. Number two in most situations you could completely negate the engaged in melee buff you are giving to an enemy unit by simply attacking with your ranged units first. So it basically adds unnecessary "micro" to a turn based strategy game.

You know that's a profoundly good point that I don't have a good response to. I'll test out that change and see what happens.

I love this mod. This same mechanic works well in so many strategy games.
My only confusion is why ranged units aren't engaged in melee when being attacked.

This is pretty much what I was hoping melee would be when I bought the game. Ranged units in melee should have big penalties. In addition, a ranged unit using points on the melee talent should get far less penalties for being in melee.

@Yorick

Theoretically, yes you could install on an existing save. This mod just changes some property definitions. There aren't any fancy scripts or elements that depend on generating a map. However, I haven't tried this out myself so who actually knows. If you really don't want to wait to start a new game, make a named save of your current game before installing the mod, then install and play. If something goes wrong, you can disable the mod and revert to your named save.

Can i turn this on with my existing savegame? Won't it mess up?

I like when ranged strikes against melee engaged units hit even your units a littlebit. Like you know, stray bullets. Cuz that can be expected when you fire into people fighting in melee.

wow this sounds greaat i play melee allot and love it but always have to play so carefully.. will try it out once i finish my colonial guard scenario (think that might mess with this mod)