I know Action Hero and Bombard have been getting most of the attention but I felt the Close Quarters fighting style had something interesting to offer. I got a chance to play one the other day in the level 5 adventure It Came From The Vast.
Character: Littlehorn Minotaur with Electrician background who notionally started with 3/3/3 physical scores, 1 Int, -1 Cha, boosted to 4/4/4/2/0/-1 at level 5. Took the Stretching Reach ancestry feat at level 5 and had Whirling Swipe, Shot On The Run, and Stock Striker as class feats. For weaponry he had an advanced stellar cannon. He also had a tactical fangblade but that was irrelevant to the adventure. He couldn't afford to have a second Advanced grade weapon and missing that damage die meant that he did more damage with Stock Striker for the time being. Other adventurers in the party included Iseph the Operative, Dae the Solarian, and a healing connection mystic.
Summary of an encounter from It Came From The Vast:
The fight inside the ship played out exactly the same as if I had picked bombard. It ended too soon to engage in melee.
The boss fight outside the ship was another story. My soldier and Dae both had mag boots. The party was split up one to a cannon despite knowing this was tactically inadvisable. Sample 62 initially attacked the Mystic, and Blossoming Interference also spread some damage around. Mystic ran and healed, Iseph fired the Advanced laser rifle, Dae used Stellar Rush and failed his attack, I used Shot On The Run with my stellar cannon and dealt an otherwise respectable 2d10 damage twice that Sample 62 happened to be resistant to. Due to the distance of engagement I would not have been able to draw a melee weapon, get to melee range, and strike in that turn. Round 2, Sample 62 focused on Iseph due to his use of fire damage and downed him with two crits in a row. Mystic healed Iseph. Dae used Stellar Rush again, this time in Graviton mode. Sample 62 passed its saving throws and Dae missed his photon shot, though this did get Sample 62's attention. I moved to melee distance and used Whirling Swipe with Stock Striker, doing 2d6+4 bludgeoning damage twice. Iseph picked up his rifle and fired two shots without aiming, judging that it was more important to get that second shot of fire damage than to get the aim bonus. Round 3, Sample 62 tried to move out of melee range of me, eating my Punitive Strike and Iseph's Hair Trigger. End combat.
Conclusion: I think I did reasonably well. I was consistently dealing 2d10 twice a round with my area fire and primary target. That's not far behind Iseph's two strike routine, though I think Iseph would do more damage than me even before considering the enemy's resistance and weakness situation. More to the point, I started doing my character's actual job on the second turn, getting in Sample 62's face and punishing its attempt to engage the ranged damage dealers.
Over all I did as the book suggested and mostly played it straight as a ranged soldier. Without a melee-compatible gap closer this guy is always going to end up shooting more often than slashing. The features that come from Close Quarters won't come up in every fight but when they do they're potentially crucial. As it happened I had no problem avoiding hitting my allies with my Stellar Cannon so I wasn't really missing much by not taking Bombard. Close Quarters did come in handy in one fight in which I used Punitive Strike to good effect. Seriously, it's better than Reactive Strike. The only thing holding it back is being attached to the Soldier class. There are also imaginable scenarios in which melee does more damage than ranged, though at this particular point in this character's career he had allowed his melee damage to lag a bit. Stock Striker isn't great damage but at least it allowed me to get in there and do what I had to do without burning an action switching weapons. If I had been stuck in melee for a longer period of time and had an on-level melee weapon I think I would have switched for the second round in melee. Prior to stock striker I think what I would have to do to initiate melee would be switch weapons, stride, strike. Stock Striker enables Stride, Whirling Swipe, Primary Target, or even Stride, Stride, Strike. Without a proper gap closer I'm either using Close Quarters to intercept melee combatants or perhaps kind of slowly maneuver to make an enemy's shooting position untenable.
Going back to how things were in SF1, Advanced Melee is analogous to what we call martial melee these days. It's just the step above basic melee. Soldiers and Solarians both came with advanced melee weapon proficiency. The equivalent of what we call Advanced these days was called Special, and those were pretty uncommon and quite niche in usage.
That's basically the core paradox of the Soldier class as written. It's an area attack class that grants single target strikes as a major pillar of its power budget.
Kickback deals additional damage more consistently than backstabber. Backstabber only works on enemies who are off guard and not immune to precision. Kickback applies on all attacks and isn't hard to negate the drawback.
Having a look at the melee weapons. Pathfinder has a mature melee weapon ecosystem so there's going to be a lot of room for comparison.
Simple:
Baton: 1d6 Finesse and parry with one hand. Interesting. Pathfinder doesn't have any 1d6 one-handed finesse weapons. And the only Pathfinder one-handed weapon with both Finesse and Parry at 1d6 is the martial Exquisite Sword Cane.
Battleglove: Renamed gauntlet.
Knife: Renamed dagger
Puzzleblade: 1d8 on a 2-hander with questionably useful trait. Damage is fine for a simple two-hander.
Shock Pad: 1d6 with free hand. Nice.
Zero Knife: A knife you can't throw, but it does cold damage. Yay?
Martial:
Aucturnite Chakram: Comparable to a trident with a shorter throwing range. In return your critical specialization effect is stupefied 1 instead of clumsy 1.
Battle Ribbon: One-handed reach is rare and valuable. Add finesse and trip and no wonder it's only 1d4. But when you compare to archaic weapons the Scorpion Whip and Thorn Whip both do the same thing plus disarm.
Bone Scepter: 1d10 on a one-hander. Remarkable even without powerful traits.
Cryopike: 1d10 two-hander with reach. No particular traits aside from doing cold damage. Normal damage for a polearm, though a few come with addtional traits like trip or disarm with the same damage.
Doshko: Has been discussed before. Questionable whether parry is worth unwieldy.
Dueling Sword: Renamed longsword
Fangblade: 1d10 two-hander with backswing, like a greatclub without Shove
Force Needle: Only 1d4 damage, but that's a lot of traits (backstabber, concealable, injection, thrown 20. Doesn't have Finesse), and two more upgrade slots than usual. That could be breakable.
Hammer: Like a warhammer that takes up two hands. Seems fine as a simple weapon.
Nano-edge Rapier: Renamed rapier.
Neural Lash: A weird weapon. Telepaths treat it as simple and can selectively ignore nonlethal and unwieldy. 1d8 in one hand is unremarkable for a martial, but high for simple.
Painglaive: 1d10 with reach. You could just get a guisarme. Archaic guisarmes have trip, don't need batteries, and are immune to glitching.
Phase Cutlass: 1d6 is a little low for a martial weapon without significant traits. Being able to switch to void damage seems to be counting for a lot.
Plasma Doshko: 1d10 two-hander with sweep, like a greataxe that does less damage. But it's fire damage, so I guess that's worth more. Is this a carryover from 1e where energy weapons did less damage to balance out how they're rolling against the generally lower EAC?
Plasma Sword: 1d8 one-hander with no traits beyond the damage type.
Polyglove: Couldn't you just use a Shock Pad, and shouldn't this have Free Hand too?
Pulse Gauntlet: Gauntlet that does sonic damage
Shock Truncheon: 1d6 one-hander with the interesting modular (arc or nonlethal) trait.
Shooting Starknife: It's a starknife
Singing Spear: 1d6 two-hander. Besides damage type and crit spec the only trait is thrown 20. Is this really supposed to be two-handed for that damage? Aside from the damage type being sonic this is just a trident that does less damage and takes two hands.
Tailblade: 1d4 agile finesse free hand, implicitly requires a tail. Nice gimmick.
Talon: 1d6 one-hander with versatile damage. Another case of energy damage being valued as worth a die size. A versatile physical martial one-hander would do 1d8.
A few gems in there, but a lot of these are a little on the weak side.
I like the idea of bringing in the existing Scatter trait. Interestingly, in SF1 the only weapon type that had enemies rolling reflex saves was explode (which the playtest calls burst). Lines and cones still made attack rolls against AC. Attacking with area weapons wasn't a special action and you could theoretically do it more than once a turn using the full attack action like any other weapon - unless the weapon also had the unwieldy trait, which the vast majority of area weapons did. The exception was automatic fire, which was a special kind of full attack that basically let you decide to do a cone attack in place of using it like a regular gun, which the playtest rules translate into PF2 language pretty faithfully.
Getting a little into the weeds of how 1e combat worked, that made area weapons unattractive to Soldiers. They had class features for attacking more than once that didn't play well with those weapons, and explode weapons didn't take advantage of their high attack bonus. These were the weapons you'd give to someone who wouldn't normally be rolling full attacks. Technical classes with busy move actions and likely not maximizing dexterity. I can certainly see the motivation behind wanting to change that up a bit, though the current draft is a little weird.
My big issue with the Soldier class so far is that it is too specialized as a base class. Pretty much every Soldier made will be an artillery piece on the battlefield, with a secondary with two-handed melee weapons. Not a single one of the base class abilities will work with, say, a standard laser rifle or dual-wielding boom pistols. Even the various specializations released in the playtest are all about aoe weapons.
I'd like to second this. My main concern with the playtest soldier is that it's a one trick pony, and discussion of how good that trick is comes in second off of that.
A spinoff from a thread in the Operative subforum. Obviously the Soldier has some issues when removed from Starfinder's material culture, what with a lot of the class's kit revolving around weapons that don't exist in the Lost Omens campaign setting. So, how would we go about this if we had to?
Right off the bat we can narrow the top two fighting styles down to Armor Storm or Close Quarters, though Bombard has its uses. Action Hero has nothing to recommend it in a setting without automatic weapons.
Armor Storm gets us a kind of interesting Athletics tank. You can do athletics maneuvers hands-free while whirling a greatsword around, plus suppressed enemies do less damage to you.
Close Quarters is a Punitive Strike tank. You can also poach some of what Armor Storm does with the right choice of weapon. A Gnoll soldier with Chomp and a war flail can grapple, trip, and disarm while losing only one die size of damage compared to greatsword, and if you want trip and reach we all know about the guisarme.
Finally Bombard's features actually work with Whirling Swipe. It basically lets you use reach weapons without a care about hitting your allies and applies the suppression debuff more reliably.
Feats: Beyond the obvious Whirling Swipe at level 1, melee soldier is really lacking feat support. Most soldier class feats assume you're using a gun. You're probably going to be taking an archetype. Wrestler is a strong choice, particularly for Armor Storm.
The standard 24x30 flip map represents a 120x150 foot area, and many of them are open outdoor spaces. The scenario Data Breach of the Dead takes place in a single 24x30 room. And let's not forget that Pathfinder adventures being set in cramped dungeons with primarily melee characters and doesn't stop the shortbow having a 60' range increment. The arbalest is up there with the best sniper rifles and the arquebus outranges everything Starfinder has to offer.
I had a game the other night where another player had Obozaya. 20 foot cone aoe that takes two actions to use was really limiting their ability to do soldier stuff on open maps. At least they could still do ranged strikes since it was a machine gun. It's hard to imagine trying to use a flame thrower for any serious purpose. I haven't had chance to actually play a stellar cannon yet. It looks like 50' should be enough to be reasonably functional at the ranges we've been playing for all that it's laughably short.
To me it seemed that the only reasonable interpretation was that the strike granted by Primary Target was an exception to the usual rules for area weapons. The designers obviously intended for the feature to be useable with area weapons since the description lists them among the weapons you can use it with. You also don't get an additional area fire since Primary Target specifies a Strike.
Also, looking further down into soldier class feats there is Punishing Salvo. Requirements: Your last action this turn was an Area Fire attack. As an action make a ranged strike against your primary target. Ignore the unwieldy trait. This does not make a new area attack, and is treated as a Strike made using primary target.
Clearly this feat is intended to be used with area weapons since it only works with area weapons and it spells out clear as can be that you resolve the attack as a Strike even though the weapon has the area trait.
A note on the significance of the Ginger Chew, you can't willingly ingest anything while sickened. This makes purging the Sickened condition particularly important in a party that relies on alchemical elixirs.
Gaining even root access to any given appliance or terminal doesn't grant access to everything that talks to it, and anything meant to be secure generally won't be on a network. The reason why the module doesn't tell you the DC to take over unrelated systems is because you can't do it from there. Door locks have no business talking to the security cameras. The office coffee maker can't set the main reactor to overload. If you want to tamper with life support you will need physical access to the life support computer so you can use its user interface or affix a hacker kit. Successfully venting the atmosphere would incidentally only kill anyone not wearing armor, so the guards would be fine but you could manage to kill all the prisoners and office workers that way.
I don't have a definite answer to question 1 but I think as a reaction to getting dropped prone would at least be reasonable.
Taking a swift action means you can't use a full action on the same turn. I believe the main benefit of this is being able to stand up and full attack.
I'm still in progress on a detailed read through. I haven't gotten to the actual section yet but I did get the ones buried in the race options.
Ambusher: Terrible. Not strictly useless but it's too closely tied to sniping with sniper weapons and can't overcome the inherent weakness of trying to fight that way.
Fourfold tactician: More a grab bag of things you can do with four arms than a coherent fighting style but the benefits are ok.
Battlemaster: It was probably written under the assumption that the user would be wielding a Doshko so they'd have that move action available due to not using full attacks. However you're not getting much for it.
Squad Soldier: Very nice team-based melee tank. Combines well with the Ysoki alternate racial trait Swarmer if you were so inclined - that way you can use the feature that boosts flanking and the feature that aids adjacent allies at the same time. Shame they hid it under Half Elf racial options where nobody is going to read it.
Mystic connection, Crusader: An attempt at representing a Paladin. I'm no expert at the Mystic class but it looks pretty weak. You're granting a bonus to recovering from disease when other connections are raising the dead, calling meteor showers, and teleporting between planets and you've had access to Remove Affliction for some time.
That's not a Kasatha, that's Two Ysoki Under A Coat! You need two melee PCs, at least one of whom must be a Ysoki with the Swarmer alternate race feature and at least one of whom must have the Scurry feat. They can occupy the same space and count as flanking anyone who enters their threatened area. Still works if one of the characters is a Ysoki with both of the listed requirements and the other character is any other melee character.
You don't actually need the Scurry feat since it isn't necessary to occupy the same space to use Swarmer, it's just more fun that way.
You can combine the Scurry feat with the level 6 feature of the Street Rat theme to squeeze through spaces one eighth the size of your normal space (7.5 inches?) without the usual penalties for squeezing, but when is that going to come up.
It's basically a blue star plasma cannon, surely? It has the Explosion and Unwieldy properties and takes the same sort of battery as any high-tier energy weapon with usage so high it only gets ten shots. Single-target damage isn't as high as you might want but then no area effect energy weapon has any business beating a level-equivalent reaction cannon in that regard.
