I particularly liked the way close combat flowed, creating a much more dynamic (and of course cinematic) feel to it, instead of just attack, dodge, attack, dodge (there was still a lot of dodging, but it felt like there was a purpose to the dodging).
Parrying was also more useful especially with the chances of a counter attack. In fact there were two occasions where the counter attack drastically changed the outcome with Marco's Rogue trader knocking Isabella straight unconscious in the first game and Isabella taking Levenson's head clean off after parrying his attack in the last game.
Counter attacks are quite often less likely in IRE (as they can be beaten by a good initial attack*), but even a single counter attack can now roll well and get past a defence, so the attacker is not automatically at the advantage.
* An odd consequence of the original rules was that high WS attackers were more likely to be counter-attacked than low WS ones (as only successful attacks allowed a parry). In IRE, a high WS attacker is harder to counter-attack. And actually, I really liked that. I had had initial concerns about whether the 3+ action rolls would cause a problem where characters could chain a barrage of attacks (the increase to a 3+ roll is partly to offset characters storing reactions, but they don't need to do that while Engaged), but it actually felt less like characters were taking turns to hit each other, even if we saw a fair few cases where characters managed to roll four or five actions in combat. (Don't get me wrong, rolling lots of actions was still important, but WS did feel more important than I).
I am really pleased with the close combat system so far; it's worked far better than I had ever imagined it might.
We saw some close combats that would have been unlikely in 1stE (the brutally quick counter attacks), and others that would have been impossible (by the letter of the 1stE rules, Hella and Isabella's epic duel, stepping aside, phasing through walls, etc, would have just been "dodge two yards back, advance and attack, repeat"). To me, that's a massive success.
I liked the opposed dice rolls and having to beat your opponents score (while still passing of course) meant that it was easy to work out who had won. This was probably the biggest overall change and took a bit of getting used to.
I'll concede that reversing the margin of success was something took getting used to when I started testing the rules, but it's more a question of unlearning a habit than because it's actually a difficult mechanic.
I may well adapt much the same mechanic as a house rule in some of my other D100 games, as it works very well as far as gameplay. (Although I concede that psychologically if you want to roll under your target number, then rolling
lots under your target number feels more impressive).
However I think it was mostly due to the powers I was using not really being heavily effected by the psy rating, mostly due to Marco not having had time to look at all the chaos ones yet.
It's more the case that I didn't want to rewrite every single power until the underlying mechanics were tested. If the core psychic power mechanics proved to be flawed, then all the power descriptions would fall down around it.
On the other hand, I also needed some powers to actually test the rules with - and on that front, the rulebook powers seem a fairly reasonable test sample.
This meant that Isabella didn't fail a psychic risky action in any of the three games.
Well, while we didn't have any Perils of the Warp, we did have a couple of phenomena - a "Psy Quake" and a "Dark Foreboding". Neither was hugely dramatic, but they're not supposed to be.
I think there definitely needs to be some reason/incentive to use a higher psy rating (perhaps an 'optimum' rating level on each psychic power with a 10% penalty for casting below that optimum rating and a bonus for casting at a higher level?).
High psy ratings do reduce difficulties slightly, and it also affects how easy it is to nullify/resist powers, which we didn't have cause to see.
However, the idea of a psy rating threshold could be interesting. The intensity stat could perhaps be reworked that way, so I'll look into it.
