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Last night I rolled into my FLGS with my guard army for the first time in awhile, and wanted to play something different. I found a person to play with who has also had a fair bit of first person shooter experience, and the game we set up was akin to a "domination" game from that genre. It wound up being super fun, and I wanted to share how it worked.

The board was set up in a roughly symmetrical S shape with an objective on each of the ends, one in the crux of the bends and one in the middle with a lot of LOS-blocking terrain as befits this kind of mission with some other terrain set up for being able to fight over not just the S-shape.

The main special rule was that every unit in the game got IG's "send in the next wave", wherein if a unit was destroyed on your opponent's turn, you could bring it back into play at the beginning of your turn, and you can always, at the beginning of your movement phase, voluntarily remove a unit from play and put it back into continuing reserve. The only caveat was that only infantry units with no heavy weapons (excluding sniper rifles) or fancy way of getting onto the table (embarked in a transport, deepstriking, etc.) could come back immediately like this, while everything else had to spend an extra turn "waiting" in reserve before being able to be brought back on.

And, of course, when the units entered play, they came on the board from any objective you controlled (as if it was a board edge). Objectives were scored by getting a unit within 3" of one at the end of the movement phase, and then still having a unit within 3" at the end of your next movement phase. If that was true for both players, then the objective flips over to being contested, and neither player can spawn from there. Also, true to form, you can only capture objectives sequentially (though that could be changed if you want). Also, to make it work, ALL units counted as scoring.

The end result, was a game that was fantastic, and for lots of reasons.

Firstly, the game pretty quickly started looking like an FPS when on this kind of mission (or, actually like Dawn of War 1, actually). Instead of the game being one where you line up, each side fires a volley, and then you see who won, the game instead was much more of a grinding stalemate where the line of battle slowly moved backwards and forwards, with both players plotting and scheming and trying to time things right to get an advantage on their opponent. It meant that you could make mistakes, but then recover, and you sometimes wanted to mass push with everything forward, but sometimes you wanted to hang back and consolidate. The game felt WAY more strategic.

Also, the spawning system worked perfectly. You couldn't just hang back and shoot stuff because you couldn't blow your opponent off an objective and then take it after, because by the time you started advancing, their units were already back on the objective. Likewise, you couldn't just bum rush with crappy killing power and try and sneakily just take the objective (like jetbikes at the end of the game in regular 40k), because the objectives were easier to defend, and actually mattered DURING the game, rather than just at the end. The end result was that you needed to combine movement and shooting in an intelligent way and build your list to have different units doing different things and use them with synergy, rather than just looking only at the killing power a unit could put down (because killing power didn't straight matter when it was undone by respawning). Also, it became really important to time your attack with your killing power. You sort of had to think several turns ahead, rather than just thinking forward until the point where you killed your opponent's stuff.

There were a few other nice things as well. For one, it got rid of that annoying thing where your opponent could get just a little bit lucky and ruin everything. There was no such thing as a unit being killed before it got a chance to contribute to the game. Also, it made some usually marginal stuff less awful. Krak grenades wound up being really useful, for example, because usually you get killed before you get to use them, but in this case, the game requires you to get in close, and you have many chances of using the grenades. I also took camo netting on one of my tanks which likewise didn't stop the tank from getting killed several times, but it did occasionally block shots and at key times a couple of times. It actually felt like it was worth its 20 point cost.

It also added a new tactical dimension with the respawning. For example, it happened several times where one of our tanks was critically wounded, but you had to really weigh your options. On the one hand, that 1-HP hellhound without its inferno cannon was basically neutered, and you could always voluntarily remove it, which will allow you to get a fully-capable one back more quickly. On the other hand, if you leave it on the table, your opponent still needs to waste firepower on it, and that wounded hellhound still has its multimelta, and can still tank shock and block units, etc. You have to sort of consider all of the possible uses of a unit, rather than just the one you usually think of.

I suppose the last thing to note was our lists. For this kind of a game, you want to keep things rather small - enough to get roughly one fancy toy, or two if you're willing to bet on such a low-unit strategy, which actually matters in this mission. Furthermore, you've got to balance having several cheap units with bad guns to quickly respawn against heavy hitters who respawn less frequently, but are able to actually kill stuff. Also, because the movement phase actually matters, you need to actually consider mobility, but also weighed against the fact that they respawn more slowly.

What things looked like for us was guard on guard at 750 points. The only restriction we made was no fliers or superheavies. I'm sure that there's a way to make that work (say, they respawn even more slowly, for example), but we decided that things were new enough.

Our lists were:

Him:

Lord commissar - 2x plasma pistols

Vets - mortar, 3x sniper rifles
Vets - 2x flamers, heavy flamer, carapace
Vets - 3x plasma guns, carapace, chimera

Punisher - lascannon, multimeltas

Me:

CCS - 4x sniper rifles, powerfist, krak grenades

Vets - 3x meltaguns, chimera

PCS - lascannon
PIS - meltagun
PIS - meltagun
PIS - meltagun

Hellhound - multimelta, camo netting
Scout sentinel
Scout sentinel

As was our customs, I went for the throng of goobers approach, and my opponent went with a more elite army. The interesting thing was that neither played this mission just straight better. My opponent's defensive abilities were withering, and I struggled to make my relatively lackluster killing power count, but I also had a lot more units, and so a lot more flexibility (and that actually mattered), and my army was more maneuverable, especially with the sometimes-spawning-at-objectives and sometimes-outflanking sentinels. The two of us had to quickly start playing our armies rather differently, rather than the usual 40k shoot with long-range stuff and advance only if you have to that both of our armies would have otherwise done.

The neat part too was that everything was used in this game. The punisher sometimes needed to throw its anti-tank at my hellhound, and sometimes had the luxury of gunning down infantry while my scout sentinels attacked everything, and my CCS did shooting with the sniper rifles, running forward to give orders, killed the lord commissar once with the powerfist in a challenge, and even killed the punisher once with a krak grenade being the decider. We were really rewarded for thinking on the fly and trying to make worthwhile sacrifices and timing our attacks right and executed in a certain way based on our lists.

The other really neat thing was that, when the game was done (we called it due to time when I'd captured my 4th objective), both of us were thinking about how so many other units would be so useful in this game. Stormtroopers for taking objectives mid-game, respawning ogryn to act as a shield unit. Heck, even penal legionnaires would be useful as they get the fast respawn time of no-heavy-weapon infantry, but could also outflank once the game got towards one of the short edges of the board. It felt like there were dozens of roles to be filled, and there were dozens of units to fill them, rather than just boiling everything down to which units can apply the most killing power fastest.

Plus, we both had a blast. 40k with respawning is so much better than 40k without. Much more bonkersness and fist shaking followed by "I'll get you next time, just wait till I respawn! You'll see!"

Anyways, I just wanted to share this experience and encourage others to try something like this. It was pretty fun.

Sounds awesome, I might have to get the guys to give this a try at some point, as it seems like a good way to shake things up, and also get a lot of mileage out of smaller armies. I imagine a 750 army would essentially end up 'worth' around 1500+ by the time a few turns of respawning had been done, but without people being able to spend 1000 points on crazy deathstars.

It also seems to reward versatility which could be a challenge when most units exist with a single purpose in 'normal' games (as if there's such thing as normal in 40k).

How did you do 'scoring' in terms of VPs? Was it a fairly simple '1 point for every turn you hold an objective' or was it whoever held most objectives at the end of a time limit? I imagine both could work.

Paradigm wrote:Sounds awesome, I might have to get the guys to give this a try at some point, as it seems like a good way to shake things up, and also get a lot of mileage out of smaller armies. I imagine a 750 army would essentially end up 'worth' around 1500+ by the time a few turns of respawning had been done, but without people being able to spend 1000 points on crazy deathstars.

It actually wound up being able to have its cake and eat it too. On the one hand, you got the "your list building decisions actually matter" of a small points game, but on the other hand you got the mass slaughter of thousands and thousands of points in a giant battle. I killed my opponent's punisher I think like 6 times over the course of the game, so that's like 1200 points just in that. Meanwhile, my PISs were dirt cheap, but had a tendency to fall like rain during a summer storm (especially since I had an itchy trigger finger with respawning - I voluntarily removed damaged squads a lot). I'd say that each of the squads was killed off at least 5 or 6 times, which is another ~1000 points from just infantry squads.

Paradigm wrote:It also seems to reward versatility which could be a challenge when most units exist with a single purpose in 'normal' games (as if there's such thing as normal in 40k).

Well, specialist units still work as well, but, being at such a low points level, you have to plan for them very carefully to make sure everything else is covered. If you take specialist units, you've got to have some synergy.

There was a time in the game where his punisher brought my hellhound down to 1 HP and blew off the multimelta and I decided to keep it on the board, and what happened was that it quickly became a specialist anti-infantry weapon, which meant that it spent some amount of time twiddling its thumbs when the only targets were the punisher and a squad of vets in a chimera. I sort of needed something else in my army to bail it out while it waited for better targets on occasion.

Of course, I could have lifted the hellhound out to get the multimelta back, but then it would have spent two turns off the board, and I needed him to block LOS for my infantry squads trying to take the objective.

Paradigm wrote:How did you do 'scoring' in terms of VPs? Was it a fairly simple '1 point for every turn you hold an objective' or was it whoever held most objectives at the end of a time limit? I imagine both could work.

Well, the initial idea is that we would go until someone captured all the objectives (and killed the remaining units, presumably). After five hours of play, that didn't happen, and seemed pretty obvious that it might take a couple of sessions to properly win the game. For a more truncated version, I think I'd still go by time (and see who had the most objectives at the end) or, as you say, get points per turn that one is held. I like that less, though, as it creates the idea that someone is winning and that it might be impossible to turn the tide. You don't want to create the situation where one side has won and you're just playing through the motions.

The one thing I wouldn't do is impose a turn limit. One of the reasons this game went so well is that you were encouraged to play quickly to get as many turns in as you could to get as many chances of capturing something. Combined with it being only 750 points, the turns went pretty quick, and there wasn't any UGOIGO drudgery.

Thanks for the clarifications, I'll be sure to give this a shot when I can.

I really really like this gameplay idea. But yeah, the scoring needs to be worked on.

Perhaps giving points for each of the neutral objectives held after then end of a full turn. The game would not be based on a set number of turns but instead it would be the first to 10 or something like that.

How to turn 40k into a tabletop RTS. Awesome idea!

Seems like a neat idea, as I certainly loved the Domination mode in Unreal Tournament.

When you think about it other types of video games would probably apply well too. The "ticket" system from the Battlefield series is sort of like Domination, except your respawns change based on how many points you have captured.

Even a "MOBA" style game like Dota 2 or League of Legends could work. Basically have mooks/henchmen/basic troops running up "lanes" defended by vehicles/towers, and then a lot of cool hero units trying to push the lanes.

Can you provide any pictures of the table and the event?

Oddly enough, I didn't bring my camera to this game. I can show up next week and try to re-set-up the table as best as I can remember it and then take a picture.

I mean, I tried to set things up based on how I remembered FPS maps like this. One main path filled with ruins that people could shoot down on each other at in the middle, and then towards the end making it more barricades with a bastion being the final objectives in such a way where it became easier to defend the objectives and harder to take them the closer you got to one end or the other. And then with a few sort of side-ways to flank the center objective to fight over. Basically, I made it as close to this map as my hazy memory allowed. Of course, there's no reason you couldn't do it in some other, non-S-shape setup, like this.

The best part of copying level designs from video games is that they're already done a pretty good job of hashing out what a good level should look like for you.

bosky wrote:When you think about it other types of video games would probably apply well too. The "ticket" system from the Battlefield series is sort of like Domination, except your respawns change based on how many points you have captured.

Even a "MOBA" style game like Dota 2 or League of Legends could work. Basically have mooks/henchmen/basic troops running up "lanes" defended by vehicles/towers, and then a lot of cool hero units trying to push the lanes.

And yeah, you could do a ton of tweaks to this basic idea depending on what kind of video game you're trying to emulate. It would be pretty easy to set up, I imagine.

Also, it did feel a bit moba for me, at least. There were definitely turns where I felt like my only real option was to mass-sacrifice my endless pile of goobers until my hellhound or mechvets respawned. The latter was especially difficult for me to manage because the vets respawned in 1 turn, and the chimera respawned in 2, and the chimera and veterans weren't always killed in the same turn, so it became sort of difficult to coordinate.

Grindhammer 40k sounds great! If only players were more flexible and willing to accept non-standard rulesets. Or if GW was less gak at writing rules and limiting players to a single crappy format.

5 hours seems like a bit killer though.

I might have missed this in your initial post, but did you run into any problems with your opponent not finishing off your badly damaged / mauled units and vehicles? Like leaving 1 trooper alive from a squad of 20 just to prevent it from respawning?

Nice idea. Sounds fun.

I think you would want to keep the pts relatively low so you can get more turns faster. I imagine your game probably went for a large number of turn and 5 turns in 3 hours would not work well in such a game.

Asmodai Asmodean wrote:Grindhammer 40k sounds great! If only players were more flexible and willing to accept non-standard rulesets. Or if GW was less gak at writing rules and limiting players to a single crappy format.

Well, the strange thing too is that it was so friggin' easy to make 40k play like a very different kind of game. It's kind of strange to think that GW keeps with the same missions type, and their only alternative is coming up with super-lopsided "should win" missions like volga bulgars.

It's not like there are other kill-your-opponent games out there that have come up with other ways of doing it.

Asmodai Asmodean wrote:5 hours seems like a bit killer though.

Heh, it was a bit apocalypse-y, I suppose. That's what you get when you have what was effectively a 7,000 point game. It was better, though, because the turns were still super short, so you were kind of always busy during that time. Also, a lot more happened during the game. It wasn't 5 hours devoted to four player turns (like apocalypse can sometimes be).

Modifications could be made, of course, but for me at least, I'm kind of starting to like the idea of having a 40k game that takes a few sessions to play through.

bosky wrote:I might have missed this in your initial post, but did you run into any problems with your opponent not finishing off your badly damaged / mauled units and vehicles? Like leaving 1 trooper alive from a squad of 20 just to prevent it from respawning?

Yeah, so one of the things that made the respawning thing work is that at the beginning of your movement phase, you can always voluntarily remove a unit from the board. That way your opponent couldn't kill everything down to just one model, ignore them, and then take the objectives. The only penalty for removing the unit voluntarily is that it effectively delays them for an extra turn, as voluntary removal comes after respawning.

That said, there was a little bit of this that happened, where you tried to make something very hurt but not dead so that you'd force your opponent to remove them themselves and take the delay. That said, it's actually surprisingly difficult to do this. Taking a tank down to just 1 HP with a weapon destroyed result is a lot less likely than taking the tank down to 0 HP and just forcing it to respawn, and killing a unit of infantry down to exactly one guy is really tough as well.

Plus, those wounded squads aren't useless either. If you've only got two space marines, but one of them has the meltagun, it's usually better to kill them off and force them to respawn 12-18" away from your tank rather than letting the squad live in its broken state, but still get to shoot its meltagun. Plus, broken tanks still get to block LOS and tank shock, and still score - something broken infantry squads can do as well.

Interestingly enough, though, it actually made morale a bit bigger of a deal. Having your squads run away was the worst, because they weren't combat effective and they were generally running away from objectives and from stuff they wanted to kill (we had retreat towards nearest board edge on). My opponent tried to rally his troops (in part because he had a lord commissar, so could do that more easily), but I never had patience for taking a squad that ran away and trying to regroup them and run back to where they were before, so failed morale tests were pretty much just delayed respawning for me.

Pinning also was difficult to tell what to do for, because most squads that were pinned were squads that could instantly respawn, which meant that they were waiting a turn to do anything regardless, but respawning did drag them back to a respawn point, which wasn't always a good thing. Likewise, I had a few vehicle stunned results, and that took a lot of thought. Removing the tank would mean two missed turns instead of just one, but leaving them there meant that they were close combat bait, and even when the tank became un-stunned, it would have lost hull points. This was an especially difficult problem with my hellhound, whose main gun couldn't snap-fire. Plus, in a game of movement, having a tank temporarily immobilized had a nasty tendency to just create traffic jams.

Once again, the game format meant more decisions. Also, in the situation described above, it meant that extra armor would be a sometimes useful upgrade, rather than always being a horrible waste.

ansacs wrote:I think you would want to keep the pts relatively low so you can get more turns faster. I imagine your game probably went for a large number of turn and 5 turns in 3 hours would not work well in such a game.

Yeah, 750 was pretty much the max. At least, for guard armies. I could see possibly straying up towards 1000 if we were talking deathwing vs. 1ksons, or something.

It did seem to be the sweet spot, though. 750 was manageable and fast-paced, but also provided just enough points for you to bring a single showpiece unit.

This sounds great. the Alter of War mission in the Black legion codex is similar and very very fun. It takes a game or two to train yourself on the tactica of it but its great.

Sounds very interesting. Would be great for Escalation League play. Get a lot of game out of a small amount of points.

Wouldn't it be a bit OP for eldar. If they went turn one they could seer block the entry point for your units and you wouldn't be able to get any reinforcments , while any of theirs would be coming just fine . Plus battle focus would mean they could move twice as fast as other armies even with transports .

Also how did you get an S shaped table , must have cost a ton of cash .

Sounds like lots of fun! I'll have to try it out when I can . Thanks for posting!

Also, it might just work to play the table width-ways rather than length ways. As with your S design you were essentially just creating a tunnel right?

The missions in the 6E book are definitely lacking and this looks awesome! Thanks for sharing!!!

On a side note, is anyone else thinking that controlling certain objectives unlocks new units you didn't pay for on the initial list? For example: I control 3 objectives so I can spawn a ratling sniper unit this turn....

Makumba wrote:
Wouldn't it be a bit OP for eldar. If they went turn one they could seer block the entry point for your units and you wouldn't be able to get any reinforcments , while any of theirs would be coming just fine . Plus battle focus would mean they could move twice as fast as other armies even with transports .

Also how did you get an S shaped table , must have cost a ton of cash .

Well some armies have some very fast units, Eldar, Dark Eldar, especially, but those very fast units are also not the most resilient. So they may be able to run up and sit on the objective early, but without much support will be sitting ducks.

Also, the table itself wasn't S shaped, the terrain was S shaped.

You could take a titan in a 1500 list double tap the units on the board with your weapons and turbo boost your seers+baron in to a turn 2 position. Bunkers can't move and I don't know how they could be recycled , so no one would take them for such a scenario , so there would be no void shields to protect stuff from D weapons .

And it wouldn't just have to be eldar . a marine army of mixed SW/IH bikers could alfa strike an army off the table and then use the large bike bases to block the entry point .

Note the suggested points cap is 750 to 1000. Don't think you're squeezing a Titan in with that limit.

Sounds like a really neat idea, and it fixes a couple of things that always bothered me about the game! I might have to try it some time.

Makumba wrote:Wouldn't it be a bit OP for eldar. If they went turn one they could seer block the entry point for your units and you wouldn't be able to get any reinforcments , while any of theirs would be coming just fine . Plus battle focus would mean they could move twice as fast as other armies even with transports .

What?

Makumba wrote:Also how did you get an S shaped table , must have cost a ton of cash .

heh. It was a regular 6x4' table, it just had terrain to make it look like it had an S-shaped path. It was done at our FLGS which has a bunch of terrain just sitting on shelves.

I suppose I should have noted that the game was played the long-edge way, like hammer and anvil, except that the deployment zones were smaller, and more slanted (based on the terrain).

Bottle wrote: As with your S design you were essentially just creating a tunnel right?

Yeah, the middle was basically that. Actually, it was more of an arena with an entrance on each side going off at a diagonal. Once you broke out of the middle, though, the terrain got clearer and the combination of it being more walls and less LOS blocking made it so that the bend-wise objectives were tougher to take than the middle ones. The attacker was sort of bottlenecked out of the arena in the middle, while the defender had more freedom of movement.

pejota wrote:On a side note, is anyone else thinking that controlling certain objectives unlocks new units you didn't pay for on the initial list? For example: I control 3 objectives so I can spawn a ratling sniper unit this turn....

So, I did want to be careful with things like this. I didn't want to make it so that whoever started winning earlier found it progressively easier and easier to keep on winning.

Spinner wrote:Note the suggested points cap is 750 to 1000. Don't think you're squeezing a Titan in with that limit.

Yeah, plus, force org was still enforced.

That said, it would still be theoretically possible to fit, say, a baneblade and two naked squads of infantry and the cheapest HQ into a 750 point guard list. I'm not sure that this would actually be better, though, because you'd be throwing all of your eggs in a single basket while the rest of your army couldn't do anything.

Icculus wrote:Well some armies have some very fast units, Eldar, Dark Eldar, especially, but those very fast units are also not the most resilient. So they may be able to run up and sit on the objective early, but without much support will be sitting ducks.

I've been thinking about this as well.

There are a couple of balancing factors to consider. The first is that mechanized infantry units spawn more slowly because of the vehicle. That extra turn of missed movement would somewhat mitigate the fact that they move more quickly when they arrive. The second is that you have to take objectives sequentially, so it wouldn't be a case of the fast army just taking all the objectives but one and then hammering the other player who would be stuck in the middle. The third is that you have to get units close to spawn points in order to capture them. You can't use your mobility to stay just out of reach and kill stuff and then scoot onto an empty objective.

Mobility was actually rather interesting in that regard. It seemed to provide much more of opportunities to be tricky and sneak around stuff and to get units into the fray faster, neither of which are bad things, but neither are game-breaking either. It sort of feels like you're paying those extra points for mobility and then getting to use them for their intended purpose.

In any case, though, it would be very difficult to replicate the usual eldar jinking wave serpent wall. You just don't have enough points, and you just don't have enough big open spaces, and doing nothing more than sitting around and killing your opponent's stuff is much less useful.

Honestly at 750-1000 pts most of the crazy stuff will not be able to be taken with enough units to actually protect your own objectives. If you take a seer star and a couple minimum jetbike units you will take one objective every turn (unless the player has 2 or more squads on it then, gasp!, it will be contested) but the other player can have 5+ units all working to take your objectives for the same pts. The deathstars would be a very risky way to go in such a game and MSU has more benefits for defense of objectives but might find the taking of hotly contested objectives difficult.

The one modification I might suggest is to make infantry the minimum respawn with vehicle+infantry, jetbike, jetpack, etc. increased amount of time. From you current rules it doesn't appear that jetbikes and jetpack units loose anything compared to a infantry squad.

You would also have to figure out how this interacts with tervigon spawns and portaglyph. Do the new units also get to respawn at objectives therefore creating an escalating number of units (kind of awesome but unbalanced).

Also how do you deal with SitNW and units that paid for similar abilities? Perhaps give them immediate respawn where when you pick them up you just put them right back on the objective?

ansacs wrote:Honestly at 750-1000 pts most of the crazy stuff will not be able to be taken with enough units to actually protect your own objectives. If you take a seer star and a couple minimum jetbike units you will take one objective every turn (unless the player has 2 or more squads on it then, gasp!, it will be contested) but the other player can have 5+ units all working to take your objectives for the same pts. The deathstars would be a very risky way to go in such a game and MSU has more benefits for defense of objectives but might find the taking of hotly contested objectives difficult.

Yeah, and I noticed that that balance of offense vs. defense was somewhat hard to manage. If you had one killer offensive unit, then yeah, it would be easy to pound your way onto an objective, but if your opponent has good defense, or is able to spawn a HUGE pile of guys before you're able to actually contest the objective, then it's going to be you with your strong unit not taking objectives, or, at best, being able to contest them, but not be able to claim them (because they can only kill one unit at a time), leaving weaker units to try their best with what points you allowed them.

I myself faced the other problem. I was very offense-oriented, and I was trying the swarm approach, but my opponent had that punisher sitting squarely on his objective, which meant that the game went on for turn after turn of me successfully preventing him from taking it back with sacrificial infantry, but I couldn't actually displace that stupid punisher as it glibly wrecked everything, forcing me to spend most of my efforts just GETTING there without actually killing it. The game ended, in fact, when I blew up the punisher in such a way where I was finally able to actually capture the objective in the turn that the punisher had to stay off the board.

But on the other hand, those mechvets and punisher were great on defense, but my opponent was rather limited in his offensive abilities, as the moment he tried to advance with his ~2 or 3 units, they'd get focused down by my melta hedge and mobile support units, and there's no way that that punisher was going to be able to capture an objective while only moving 6" per turn.

As such, taking big, expensive units makes your army good for what that big expensive unit is good for, but it limits your ability to do everything else.

ansacs wrote:The one modification I might suggest is to make infantry the minimum respawn with vehicle+infantry, jetbike, jetpack, etc. increased amount of time. From you current rules it doesn't appear that jetbikes and jetpack units loose anything compared to a infantry squad.

Yeah, that's included already. Infantry with no heavy weapons or special deployment respawn instantly, while everything else has to wait an extra turn. That includes all non-infantry, from vehicles to jump pack infantry to cavalry. Anything from just the infantry section of the rulebook.

ansacs wrote:You would also have to figure out how this interacts with tervigon spawns and portaglyph. Do the new units also get to respawn at objectives therefore creating an escalating number of units (kind of awesome but unbalanced).

I don't know if I'd be too worried about units that spawn other units. Perhaps I don't have enough experience to know why I should be bothered by them, though.

I have been thinking about some other things, though, that would need curtailing. Given how strange flier mobility is, I think it would probably break this mission, and so I think I'd add the rule that fliers (or FMCs) don't count as scoring. Perhaps with the option to use fliers as fast skimmers and FMCs as regular MCs if a player wants to keep them able to score. Likewise, given the screwiness of their extra durability combined with respawning, I think I'd make it so that monstrous creatures have to spend two extra turns off the table, rather than just the one of other non-infantry. Same with superheavies.

ansacs wrote:Also how do you deal with SitNW and units that paid for similar abilities? Perhaps give them immediate respawn where when you pick them up you just put them right back on the objective?

I don't know.

With conscripts, that's not that big of a deal, because it means you don't need to buy chenkov or pay the huge pile of points for the upgrade. You wind up getting more of what you wanted (respawning conscripts), which I'd consider an advantage enough.

Are there other units like this?

---

Oh, I think I get what you mean about the unit spawner thing. In that case, you'd just make a rule where units that were spawned by other units/upgrades don't, themselves, get to respawn. If you make them one-and-done then your opponent wouldn't be able to snowball an uncontrollable number of units. They'd still be able to sit around and just keep spawning, but if you don't shut down their spawners, then that's your own fault.

There are several tyranid units now that respawn on a 4+ from the dataslates (there may be others I don't know about though).

Imagine a 10-20 turn game where the portaglyph player gets average dice and spawns an extra 5-10 units. They may not be large in number but good luck closing on any objectives when you have to eat your way through 10+ respawning units that have either shrouded or can gtg in terrain for a 2+ or 3+ reroll ones cover save. If you go over 20 turns the daemon player would become essentially unassailable. Tervigons could do essentially the same thing as 2 tervigons could very quickly give another 2-3 units of ~7 gaunts each. Another almost 10 units is huge in a game where you probably only had 4-10 units anyways. The S shape and low points would also make destroying these spawners very difficult and most could be reset by killing them.

Flyers were already essentially not scoring as the 3" is impossible to get from the hull or wings of the vehicle. The only one which could score is the heldrake which has low wings (not the easiest thing to do though). I think flyers would be fine but you might want to make some of the objectives into quadd guns or allow the ADL/fortifications to be respawned at new objectives.




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Yep that would fix the respawners.

I still think it would be interesting to see supped up SiNW conscripts.

More than that though I would love to see a series of batreps about your trial and implementation of this system. Now how do we convince you and your wife this is a good use of your time?

portaglyphs are really easy to kill though. To be fair.

ansacs wrote:Imagine a 10-20 turn game where the portaglyph player gets average dice and spawns an extra 5-10 units. They may not be large in number but good luck closing on any objectives when you have to eat your way through 10+ respawning units that have either shrouded or can gtg in terrain for a 2+ or 3+ reroll ones cover save. If you go over 20 turns the daemon player would become essentially unassailable. Tervigons could do essentially the same thing as 2 tervigons could very quickly give another 2-3 units of ~7 gaunts each. Another almost 10 units is huge in a game where you probably only had 4-10 units anyways. The S shape and low points would also make destroying these spawners very difficult and most could be reset by killing them.

I don't see how spawning units would be substantially different than the respawning that's already going on, especially if the spawned units don't themselves, respawn. I mean, a person could keep falling back and creating a giant pile of spawned untis and then rush them in all at once, but what are they doing while they're hanging back to spawn? What are their opponents doing?

Plus, if the spawned units don't respawn, then you'd have several turns of waste for the purpose of applying all of that killing power at once. That sounds like a fair trade to me, especially if you're going to have to pay so many extra points to make that work.

ansacs wrote:Flyers were already essentially not scoring as the 3" is impossible to get from the hull or wings of the vehicle. The only one which could score is the heldrake which has low wings (not the easiest thing to do though). I think flyers would be fine but you might want to make some of the objectives into quadd guns or allow the ADL/fortifications to be respawned at new objectives.

Some fliers can also enter hover mode, which is more what the rule was for. It seems like it would be too easy for a unit to make it onto an objective while the flier arrives at great speed towards the objective at a great difficulty to kill (so, causes both the mobility and durability problems in this respawning game), and then drops down into hover mode and basically guarantees that you contest or capture an objective without very much real risk until after the deed is done.

ansacs wrote:I still think it would be interesting to see supped up SiNW conscripts.

So, the problem with conscripts coming back instantly is that it would be impossible to contest objectives. Every time the conscripts died, they'd immediately form up a new ring of guys where your opponent couldn't get within 3" of the objective.

You might be able to get away with something using excessive amounts of multi-unit tank shocking, if you were lucky and played it just right, but I'd think this would otherwise just break the game too badly.

ansacs wrote:More than that though I would love to see a series of batreps about your trial and implementation of this system. Now how do we convince you and your wife this is a good use of your time?

lol. My wife has been overtly hostile to 40k for some time now. That hostility is slowly starting to drain, but it's a tough crowd here, so to speak.

And if this takes off, then I'll definitely consider a battle report series about it.

I wrote that before you added the bit about spawning unit not respawning. With that addition they will be okay. As for the portaglyph being easy to kill. Not really on an S shaped board at 750 pts. Getting LoS to it will be a major issue and if it dies you pull the DP and have him throw down another one.

Vehicles always score from the hull. Therefore hove mode changes nothing. Still scoring heldrakes is not good so go for it.

I meant that they can be removed at the start of the movement phase and replaced immediately. Therefore they could be assaulted and overrun onto the objective fairly easy.

This is why we need to convince the wife. Tell her how the writing gets your creative juices flowing and write some nice "creative" poetry about her. visa ve 40K makes you a better husband

ansacs wrote:I wrote that before you added the bit about spawning unit not respawning. With that addition they will be okay. As for the portaglyph being easy to kill. Not really on an S shaped board at 750 pts. Getting LoS to it will be a major issue and if it dies you pull the DP and have him throw down another one.

Sure, but if you have to remove the demon prince, it's going to be spending 3 turns off the board waiting in reserves. You'd probably think long and hard about removing such a valuable asset just to respawn the portal.

I guess there would still be a question of if the portal should close when the unit that threw it is killed. Probably not, but I could see an argument for it.

ansacs wrote:Vehicles always score from the hull. Therefore hove mode changes nothing. Still scoring heldrakes is not good so go for it.

Oh, I thought when vehicles were skimmers that the base counted as part of the model.

ansacs wrote:I meant that they can be removed at the start of the movement phase and replaced immediately. Therefore they could be assaulted and overrun onto the objective fairly easy.

Oh, okay. I thought you meant immediately as in always immediately, not immediately as in removing the restriction on going into reserves. That makes it much less broken.

ansacs wrote:This is why we need to convince the wife. Tell her how the writing gets your creative juices flowing and write some nice "creative" poetry about her. visa ve 40K makes you a better husband

My lovely fair, shall I consider you to a Space Marine?
Your eyes, they sparkle like the retrothrusters of a drop pod boring deep into the deployment zone of my heart.
Your lips, they are as lush and red as a unit that gets +1 inch of movement in the movement phase.
Your breath is as cheesy as a triptide taudar list.

...umm.

I think I might have to work on this a little.

Ailaros wrote:Sure, but if you have to remove the demon prince, it's going to be spending 3 turns off the board waiting in reserves. You'd probably think long and hard about removing such a valuable asset just to respawn the portal.

I guess there would still be a question of if the portal should close when the unit that threw it is killed. Probably not, but I could see an argument for it.

Yeah, there are a lot of questions the portal brings up in this. I would probably treat it as it's own unit after being thrown and allow it to respawn (as you payed for it) but the prince looses the ability to throw more while it is deployed.

Ailaros wrote:Oh, okay. I thought you meant immediately as in always immediately, not immediately as in removing the restriction on going into reserves. That makes it much less broken.

Conscripts need to be OP!

Ailaros wrote:
My lovely fair, shall I consider you to a Space Marine?
Your eyes, they sparkle like the retrothrusters of a drop pod boring deep into the deployment zone of my heart.
Your lips, they are as lush and red as a unit that gets +1 inch of movement in the movement phase.
Your breath is as cheesy as a triptide taudar list.

...umm.

I think I might have to work on this a little.

Don't forget how her scent is the scent of an ork squig on a warm summer day...wait, did you want to stay married?