Mount & Blade, but with a bit more animation fluidity. It's a nice skill based system that is easy to learn but hard to master. It doesn't really work that well with poor latency though - so for that to work we'd probably need region-based servers - which I'm hoping for anyway, because I'm not looking forward to playing an action-based MMO with up to 250ms ping between me and the person I'm fighting (like the devs have mentioned they're planning to build the game to be able to compensate for that) - tbh I find anything over 100ms unplayable in most other games and over 75ms is pretty bad.

Why would anyone play ranged then?

Fair point. In some instances of HTH combat damage from ranged sources should be decreased - Say for example an assault trooper is using a storm hammer / shield

That's very different, if you have a shield you should block frontal damage as long as you are blocking, but I don't like the idea of such a huge damage resistance against ranged attacks, it feels like lazy design (game and level).

My experience is only coming from Mount&Blade, Chivalry, War of the rose and War of the vikings.

I skimmed though the topic and saw that War of the rose/vikings wasn't mentioned.

War of the vikings features the most precise, versatile and intuitive combat :
- You have 3 basics different strikes, that you can charge by raising your arm before striking. Yet you can't maintain this "charge" at the maximum for too long : it quickly decrease. So you can either strike with different kind of more or less light blows or anticipate to deliver a big one, which can crush someone head if done right.

- You have 1 scripted, slow yet powerful strike for each weapon that most of the time crush opponents, or get you crushed if you miss it.

- You've got scripted dashes in any direction that can be followed by an attack. (Sometimes, a fight can be resumed by one opponent just doing dumb horizontal swing/LMBing and the other duck underneath, smashing the ribs by the attack from the dash, before crushing the head.)

- Block depend on where you're looking at or mouse direction/interrupts/blablabla/standard features among those three games.

Yet, War of the vikings didn't had hit-box as precise as War of the rose in terms of armor (You had to strike the mail coat underneath metal plates to inflict damage with your sword and you could offer yourself to not care with a mace.)

Mount & blade don't have the stamina feature, so skilled fights look like retarded fights.
Chivalry don't offer you to charge your weapon, so timing remains the same (Unless your opponent feints/lacks stamina/twist himself in weird position to reduce the path that his animation has to do to it you. You have to play to Chivalry to understand what I oddly said. x))

However, Chivalry animation allowed you to dodge attacks by crouching and looking your feet/going fetus-style, allowing comebacks during fights.
I guess there's also some "special timings" that can make you answer after a parry faster than an usual strike, yet i've never figured them out while others more experienced players never had problem to do.


Nonetheless. We have to consider the part the melee combat will take into the game :
- Targeting your opponent can be a good way to make a refined melee system work (And resolves issues about the size of the differents character : blocking blows between space marines can be conceivable, seeing a banshee blocking a chaindsword like a space marine does with his bolter is madness. Targeting opponent offers the possibility to block while animation look like the banshee could have dodge/send away the chainsword, while actually blocked it in terms of gamplay.) however it has issue about number inferiority.
- If the melee part isn't the main point, precise chivalry/war of the vikings/rose system are not useful : a space marines crossed with the dark souls system can be good. So, i don't really know.

Wait & see until we can test by ourselves.

2 ppl running the battlefield to slap each other silly , they'll have to cross a gauntlet of bullets first.
Gunplay won't fall out of fashion

I really like the Mount & Blade system idea, but i've been in games where im dueling people and winning and then i get a spike on my net and suddenly i can't hit my parries. I would like that skill based type of melee combat but i think stability needs to be a priority

I like the melee combat where i can hit the bad guy with my sword like WOOSH! and then he dies.

EDIT: honestly i love the system they have implemented now, and its only alpha, so i can't wait to see how the finished product looks

Voted other, as none of the listed options would work for the type or war scale that we are looking at for EC.

The system needs to have depth, but not so complicated that people forgo melee for sticking to complete shooting (outside of assault marines/havocs jumping into a gun like and ripping them to pieces)

I think that light attack, heavy attack, kick and block is enough to have a melee system with depth, while not being overly complicated. We just need to be careful that you don't get into situations where if someone is blocking constantly there needs to be a way for either the blocker or the assailant to break the deadlock and have the combat move forward beyond assailant kick and then pummels the would be blocker