In Robin Laws' rather fine booklet on running a role playing game (title is something like "Robin's Rules), he provides a lot of "well of course!....but why didn't I ever think of it so clearly? common sense advice. One bit that really hit home to me is that there are different types of players, and you need to provide them all with what they want.
I might be missing or mis-calling one or two, but the types included the Butt-kicker, who wants lots of amazing fights, and the power gamer, who wants to get ever more powerful and invulnerable. It sounds like your group may be dominated by this type of player, which makes whether you want more subtlety a little moot--if you want happy players you need to give them great fights and opportunities to get more powerful.
What you may want to do however is try and convince the butt-kickers that a variety of skills actually make fights more exciting, and the power gamers that having a variety of skills actually makes them more powerful.
While writing this I flashed back to a rather good article in an old Champions supplement (at least, it has stuck with me for close to 20 years, so i suppose it was rather good) about how to get a super hero team to develop team tactics. It basically suggested pitting the heroes against their mirror images...but have the mirror images have team tactics working, so they were bound to win.
The same sort of thing could be used here, I think. Develop a group of "nemesis" for the heroes. They should be very similar to the heroes, with slightly weaker close combat, but more diverse skills. First encounter, the heros push them around, but they escape (good movement and evasion skills, don't you know). Then they start beating the heroes, or at least coming very close to doing so, by thing like ambushing them (give the heros starting AP equal to their best alertness, sensing, or "lightning reflexes" skill if they don't detect the attack. Starting that low on AP should make them mighty determined not to have that happen again!). Have them make other sort of trouble, have them launch skirmishing attacks, throwing spears then escaping, etc. They don't have to be good enough to be deadly, but good enough to be potentially dangerous.....and they aren't willing to stand still for a "fair fight." In fact, the only way the heroes will get them into a stand up fight is to take the initiative and use their "secondary skills" to force it.
The second part of the combo is give them an adversary who is better at them in close combat. Someone that they can't beat in a "fair fight"....and make him/her/it mighty cocky and arrogant on the subject. A professional Humakti duellist, a ten year veteran of the games in Glamor, whater. Someone who is absolutely deadly in an straight forward close combat fight....but who has very narrow abilities. The heroes can defeat him/her/it without too much trouble, once they take a different tact on doing so.
Hopefully between one and the other you'll soon have heroes using a greater variety of abilities.
--Bryan
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