Scott.scgwl wrote:
IF you folks have any feedback or you want me to included/exclude anything you can always contact personally. I am looking for honest feedback and constructive criticism.
Oh yeah, I forgot I was going to post some constructive feedback about the missions! I guess I go ahead and do it.
Fallen Objectives
I quite liked these. I liked both the placement before you picked sides AND the fact that they could be captured by any of your units. It added a nice twist sometimes to what deployment zone you wanted to pick and another nice little objective to go for. So thumbs up on this!
Slaughter-Style Kill Points
Let's be honest here. One of the effects of standard Kill Points on the game of
40K is that they punish people who take a bunch of tiny units. Especially in a tournament this offsets the advantages that having a bunch of small units has in objective-based missions (in that a lot of small units allow you to capture contest a bunch of objectives at once).
This means that players need to balance their force between taking large enough units so that they aren't completely hosed by Kill Point missions but still have enough units to do all that capturing/contesting in objective missions.
SS Kill Points eliminates this balancing act and instead replaces it with a totally different army building restriction: Point values.
Because of the way you've done rounding up/rounding down of point values for
SS Kill Points it means players are actively rewarded or penalized by how many points their units are. A Fast Attack choice that is 201 points is worth 3
SS Kill Points when destroyed while if the same unit is 199 points it is only worth 2
SS Kill Points. This really changes how armies have to be built, but worse, it is totally and completely arbitrary. Some units in the game can easily shed 3 points here or there to fit under the 'break point' while others can't. So all of a sudden, certain units randomly become really bad choices in your tournament for no other reason then because they are just barely over a 100 point mark.
40K use to use a similar system for Victory Points back in 2nd edition and frankly it was a terrible idea they got rid of because players actively decided which options to take in their units based SOLELY on whether or not that choice would take them over the 'break point'. For example, back long ago in the day, I used to run Imperial Guard squads with absolutely no upgrades because this kept them exactly at 99 points, which meant they were only 1 Victory Point when destroyed (and 0 if halved), but if I were to add ANYTHING to the unit, then suddenly the value of destroying the unit in the game DOUBLED (being 1 for half and 1 for being destroyed).
So basically adding a SINGLE choice to the unit totally changed its usefulness. Can you see why this is a destructive and completely arbitrary way to restrict unit options?
Second, the fact that Troops units round their
SS Kill Point totals
down while other Force Org units round their
SS Kill Point totals
up means that
SS Kill Points rewards players for taking more (and more expensive) Troops choices.
While on the surface this may seem fine, the reality is this again changes the balance that the basic rulebook imposes on army creation. With the standard rulebook missions, players are rewarded for having lots of troops choices for the objective missions, but those armies that don't have stellar troops choices (like Tau, for example) know that at least in 1/3 of the missions (Kill Point missions), having sub-standard troops choices isn't that big a deal. You've gone ahead and made having more points in Troops and advantage in every single mission you have. What that does is it really rewards the few army builds out there that are able to function really well while having a bunch of points in their Troops section. While this certainly isn't a major issue, its a small change to the dynamic of how the missions normally work that really doesn't need to be changed. Even if you kept
SS Kill Points you could apply the same rounding system for every single unit...because there really is no reason you need to give a benefit to Troops choices in your
SS Kill Point missions, as those units already are rewarded/needed for all the other objective-based missions!
Finally, when it comes to standard Kill Points, with the last
IG codex fixing the Platoon Kill Point issue, and now the Tau codex fixing the Drone Kill Point problem, frankly there really aren't any major Kill Point issues left in the game. Therefore, why not embrace the balancing act that Kill Points provide to tournament army construction and use them as written in the rulebook?
Mission 1 - Join the Fallen
While the concept of making certain units worth extra kill points in return for giving them a special rule, in practice the randomness makes this rule absolutely terrible. You can easily end up in a game with one side having absolutely amazing special rules for their double kill point units, while the other side rolls all crap/useless special rules meaning these units are terrible and worth double points.
Basically the balance of the game largely hinges on how well you roll for your units!
If you're going to make units worth double Kill Points, then you should really give them the choice of what special rule they get AND players should have the option of whether or not they have to do this (i.e. they should have the choice to give up to three units a special rule, but they should not
have to).
Mission 2 - Mark the Graves
This mission is deeply, deeply flawed
IMHO.
First and foremost, anytime you have a mission where a player can effectively accrue a certain amount of points during the game and then wipe out their opponent's Troops choices and the game is then OVER, should never, ever, ever, ever, ever, ever be included as a tournament mission. You've created a situation where a game can literally get be 'over' in a turn or 2 with nothing the opponent can do except to hope to table the other army. That is frankly TERRIBLE mission design as it can easily result in a very, very unfun game (for both players).
If players can accrue points during the course of the game, then you need to have some sort of 'safety' to play for a tie at least...for example if you can destroy all of your opponent's Troops choices, then they should lose all the points they've accrued. Something. Anything. You can also mitigate this problem by having the points that are given out by holding the objective increase every turn. So an objective held in turn 1 is worth 1
VP but the same objective held in turn 5 is worth 5
VP. This won't solve the problem of a game being 'over' when the last troops model is killed on one side, but it will help get rid of the lopsided totals that can be built up early game that cannot then be overcome.
And the way that players were able to easily capture a building and then it was ridiculously hard to get that capture 'off' the building was nuts. It meant that players who got to the building first and captured it had a HUGE advantage because it was so difficult to get that capture away from them. If you are going to do a mission like this again you should really allow ANY unit that moves into the building to 'contest' it and remove the capture token. Any other way just makes the mission way too stilted towards whatever side captures the most buildings first.
Honestly this is a mission I would completely toss in the can for the reasons stated above, but if you do decide to use it again you really need to
massively tweak it.
1) Missions should not allow players to get a commanding lead that makes the final turns of the game pointless.
2) Even if you do allow an objective to be 'captured' and then moved off of, the same mechanic for contesting objectives used in every other mission should be utilized (if ANY unit ends its turn on the objective it should then lose its 'captured' state).
Mission 3 - Search for the Dead
I don't have any
major issues with this mission (I rather liked it), although I think in general its a bad idea to allow more than one objective to be in a player's deployment zone, as it tends to create a very boring game.
I would highly recommend that players are only able to 'find' one objective in their deployment zone and after that they aren't allowed to search terrain pieces in their own deployment zone for an objective.
Mission 4 - Seek Vengeance
If Mission #2 was a disaster, then this mission is a total failure.
The reason? Because it essentially invalidates large portions of your army, which then makes much of the game seem 'pointless'. Basically what happens is that players tend to hold back their units that are worth Kill Points and send out those that aren't worth points to fight. Their opponent does the same and the result is that most of the game is fought between units whose destruction has absolutely no bearing on the game. Especially in the final few turns of the game you get in situations where you're rolling dice and you're saying to your opponent 'I don't know why we're bothering rolling this, it totally has no impact on the game.'
That's just not fun! Can these games be tactical? Sure, but like Mission #2, you can get in situations where you essentially have nothing to play for, especially on one flank of the table.
Having a situation where certain nominated units are worth
double kill points can work, because then you're still getting standard kill points for the rest of the units you destroy. That means you don't have situations where parts of the battle are completely pointless and therefore un-fun. Of course, this is basically what Mission #1 was (without the special rules), but really that's as far as you should go with this concept. Making 2/3 (if not more) of the army completely and utterly worth nothing when that's basically the only mission objective in the game,
does not make for a fun mission!
If you had other objectives going on at the same time that 4
FOCs had been marked for death, or if only those
FOCs could capture the objectives, then you would have a lot more dynamism. But just having 4
FOCs being the
only objectives means that players simply hide them and most of the game is a pointless set of rolling dice and moving models.
Mission 5 - Protect the Fallen
I really liked the concept of this mission, but I honestly think that players should have to bid on the objectives
BEFORE they choose deployment zones. Having them bid
after meant that you could pretty much guarantee that the objectives that were near your deployment zone were worth more to you than the ones in your opponent's deployment zone. Which is fine, but in that case you might as well formally declare what those objectives are worth.
If you're going to take the time to secretly bid, it would be a much more exciting game to not know which objectives your opponent might really need to hold! Which is actually how the mission seems to be written before you guys changed it on the day of the event (too bad).
Janthkin also mentioned to me after the tournament that it might be really exciting if you got the
VPs both for what you
and your opponent bid on the objective. I agree that this could be a really crazy game, but I think it would probably make it far to easy to get a giant swing of battle points if you both happen to bid max
VPs on the same objective (which is a bit too random for me), but its certainly a variant to think about.
And that's about it for me. Thanks so much for taking the time to run these events, I know that I certainly appreciate it and these comments are most definitely intended as constructive criticism. At the end of the day I had fun and would play again using the same missions, even if I don't personally care for some of them.
So the INFAMOUS Dark General Hunt award went to Kelly, for killing so much of my tuff army with so lil! Great, great guy and I look forward to facing him again!
I'm still planning on making it up to your open tourny. maybe I'll get a first turn revenge on Christian.
