I've been puzzled reading a few comments about the game where people say it's unbalanced in the Alien Player's favour, they can swarm the blips on the first board and overwhelm the Marine Player(s), which I've never found at all.
I've always been playing hand-to-hand as being the same as firing. So for example, an Ork rocks up to a Space Marine, and in melee rolls two white dice. He has to beat the 2 armour in order to kill the marine.
It came as a shock to find (skimming the rules for something else!) that hand-to-hand involved both sides rolling their appropriate dice and ignoring armour for either miniature involved to die depending on the higher roll.
We are trying the proper rules and they seem mad, suddenly Gretchins are terrifying instead of cannon fodder, genestealers and androids are more formidable, and the dreadnought can be slaughtered by a lucky dice roll. It seems daft that you could attack something and end up killing yourself.
I'm going to argue that playing hand-to-hand like firing (i.e. wrong) improves the game! There is no swarming to win, as melee isn't as devastating, things like androids, dreadnoughts and genestealers are still going to lean towards hand-to-hand to get an easy kill, but an ork or chaos space marine might prefer to shoot at range than get in close. Which kind of makes sense? It seems more balanced.
I suppose it does explain why Gretchen would have 1 white dice for hand-to-hand, I used to assume they were simply too small/weak to damage a Space Marine in full armour. Plus there were always some order/equipment cards that were simply not chosen because melee using the wrong rules wasn't as desirable as some of the more firing orientated ones. I admit these rules perhaps lean a little more to a 1v1 game, where there's one Alien Player and one Marine Player. Maybe I'm biased because I don't tend to play with the 1v3.
Has anyone tried playing the melee rules this way, it would be interesting to see if anyone agreed with me, or if it works still with 1v2 or 1v3.