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Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/03 23:45:55


Post by: DarkHound


My local shop is starting to open up tables for play, and there's talk of a Crusade league and the community is open to Crusade pick-up games. I'm super excited. I played a few Crusade games with my friends online 6 months ago, and we learned some lessons, but I'm eager to draw on your experiences.

I found building an Order of Battle to be a different challenge from building an army list. Since you can't tweak small upgrades to fill the points limit, we had to include unusual filler units such as Servitors. That led to more interesting and unexpected games. The Order of Battle also serves as a side-deck to customize against match-ups, and increasing the supply mostly improved that aspect while secondarily enabling larger games. It struck a comfortable balance where it was hard to really list tailor (since the core of the army couldn't change equipment), but encouraged a rivalry and arms-race against common opponents.

We played our games with points, but to minimize compatibility issues, we built our Orders of Battle with power level. I could easily make a legal army for either format out of the same OoB.

It was actually added to the narrative experience that we didn't need to keep track of anyone else's progress. Rather than everyone in a campaign building toward the same narrative, the universe felt more alive since everyone was competing for their own goals. (Not at all to knock campaigns, they should be used in conjunction.) It was great to see the Chaos Lord that escaped my assassination strike force show up two games later with a new relic weapon and more followers blooded against the Necrons.

We've found the Battle Honors weren't very egregious individually, and the risk of experience loss made collecting more than two extremely unlikely. We thought it felt better to pick the Honor you wanted. The Battle Scars, on the other hand, were more contested but actually picking the Battle Scar won out. The trick was that rolling an awful Battle Scar meant you just payed the RP to fix it, and it never mattered. Picking a Scar you can live with actually makes it to the table. The fact that my Dunecrawler is 2" slower doesn't really matter, but the fact that it's had an irreparable bum leg ever since that encounter with the Tyranids is an interesting story.

Still, choice-versus-roll is not a clear trade-off and I'd love to hear your thoughts. What have your general experiences been with Crusades? What have been your best units and secondaries for experience gain? I haven't had a particularly blessed unit yet, though I Marked most units to Blooded within a few games.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/04 00:00:48


Post by: Unit1126PLL


We did a Roll campaign locally, and I have done a Pick campaign on my own with a different army, and I must say that both of them got completely out of hand really quickly.

The "roll" system wasn't super helpful, as everyone just picked things that were either automatically useful (weapon upgrades for melee characters) or didn't need a roll at all (crusade relics). Originally it was intended to prevent the case where there are "haves" and "have nots" but it really exacerbated it - a critically good roll could set an army ahead of its peers by a good bit - enough to get extra Relics or extra Units from the crusade missions. Snowballing was a genuine problem.

Conversely, in the "Pick" meta, things got out of hand even more quickly but at least were evenly out of hand. It's noteworthy that there are almost 0 defensive upgrades (one Relic stands out for a 5+ FNP) but a ton of offensive upgrades (the entire Weapon tables). This means that the Pick crusade armies are all ridiculously more lethal than other armies, but not much more durable. This has a warping effect where almost every army is tabled every game at this point in the campaign, but everyone survives for the next round where damage might be EVEN HIGHER. At this point it's a meme how often an Imperial Guard company commander has "died" without dying, often to horrific things like a Keeper of Secrets with +1 damage and double exploding 6s.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/04 00:16:11


Post by: Inquisitor Lord Katherine


When I played a crusade league, both my Librarian and my Grandmaster Dreadknight made it to the legendary tier without suffering any losses. The GMNDK was in every game, and the Librarian popped in once the detachment changed from a Patrol to a Battalion.
A Paladin squad also got like 3 promotions, and didn't have time to reach the top of the tree because they were added to the list halfway through the league, and it was harder to structure my secondaries so that they would exclusively give XP to the paladins over the GMNDK or Librarian.

In general my secondaries were generally structured to award XP exclusively to my characters, and my other units just got by with the 1XP per battle:
Survivor - GMNDK, and once he became really high level, on the Librarian. For the Librarian, it's basically 4 free XP for showing up because they're a small character who's almost always safe, and whom nobody goes out of their way to kill just to deny me the XP.
Lord of the Warp - Essentially will always give XP to the Librarian just for being the Librarian. If you want to really drive up your psyker(s) fast, take Scry Battle Plans.
one of the No Mercy No Respite ones based on the battle - Almost always would award to the GMNDK, because the GMNDK was way more killy than everyone else.

Once the GMNDK and Librarian were maxed, it was almost a puzzle to figure out how to funnel XP to the Paladins without deliberately doing dumb things.




One thing was kind of funny. I played the same Tyranids guy like 3 times, and we went 1/1/1 W/L/D against each other, and otherwise finished with almost identical records. However, my army consistently felt vastly more powerful than his because my army of a small number of resilient units rarely suffered battle scars and never suffered them to its good units, and also had like super-characters who regenerated and ignored invulnerable saves and moved extra fast and teleported around the battlefield [well, with Gates they did that last one anyway], where as his army suffered beyond 100% casualties in most battles and he got tons of CP each game from having fewer crusade points which he used to replace Hormagaunts and Termigaunts and Genestealers right onto objective for days to win on points, but none of the replacement units could earn experience and he'd get a bunch of battle scars since he had so many units that got fragged each game.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/04 00:30:56


Post by: Brutallica


First of all, Crusade is the best way to play in my personal oppinion.

Having played crusade 7 times now or something, i dont see anything super broken in terms of relics and choices, hence im much more for picking. Rolling is random, random is not cool (especially not from a narrative perspective), never been, only thing that should be random is battle scars. Its frustrateing having your hard earned experience and battlehonors go completely down the toilet on your favorite model/unit while the other guy is raveing and cheering for his new pimped out unit. I dont see how people can advocate for this system, especially when almost everyone hated it in 5/6/7th edition.

If your opponent is somehow making obscure combos that completely breaks the game, then kindly decline playing with him. (he is probably also picking ALL the free upgrades possible since its power level).




Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/04 01:14:31


Post by: VonGerrow


I'm hoping to find some people to do a campaign when we're let out of our homes in my neck of the woods.

Will be my first games of 40k in years and would love to take the little force I've built up on a crusade.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/04 03:12:18


Post by: ccs


We did two crusades recently, one at each of the two local shops.

Crusade #1: Failure.
Started off ok with a good # of players. 12? 13? Maybe 14? Then at least one had to withdraw early on as they contracted Covid (they have recovered). Thanks to 2021, reduced hours, & most people having to work during the day, this shops only real day to play is Sat atm. Each week you'd be randomly paired up with an opponent.
The game sizes were supposed to increase, but I never got a clear explanation of what triggered that. It seemed like we spent forever locked into relatively small games on boards that were (in some cases) actually below minimum size for the PL. This was a great boon to several armies & a death sentence to others.
There was also no set "end" to this Crusade.
This combo of boredom with tiny games on dinky boards vs things that may as well have just deployed directly in melee, led to about 1/2 the players dropping out after roughly two months. Wich reduced to pool of opponents. Others then began making it to game day or not based on if they didn't have something better to do, or if "something came up".
And when people who'd legitimately missed a game or two did make back? They found themselves behind on RP, XP, & upgrades.
Let me tell you, a few extra CP is NOT equal to some of those upgrades & battle honors.
It wasn't long before the number of players dropped to 3 or 4 (depending upon one guys work schedule).
And it officially petered out about two weeks ago - at 65PL.

Crusade #2: Success
This one ran for a set 10 weeks: 25pl, 35pl, 45pl, 55pl, a team game where each team had two randomly drawn players each with a 55pl force (so 110pl/side), 65pl, 75pl, 85pl, 95pl*, 105(?)pl*
*"Named" characters could only be used week 5(?)+, LoW could only be used in the last two weeks.
*There was some confusion at the Patrol lv games over what sort of detachment could be chosen - some people didn't realize that per the book the Crusade starts as an actual Patrol detachment. Didn't have much of an effect, but I wish I'd been one of them & gotten to start off with a Vanguard or whatever.
*Games could be played on any size table you & your opponent agreed to.
This shop is open 7 days a week, so scheduling your weekly game was much easier.
*Each week you were randomly paired up from a pool of almost twenty players.
There wasn't much player drop off.
There were however a fair # who after some point simply stopped tracking XP, honors, scars, etc. Essentially just playing straight PL & receiving bonus CPs.
Let me reiterate, a few bonus CP is NOT = to some of those Crusade perks. Especially at higher level games.
All in all though fun was had & a wide sampling of armies saw battle.

Nominally each of these Crusades were running the Indom campaign. But in practice almost no games ever used anything from it other than the actual missions.

I highly recommend adding the following models to your collection for Crusades:
1) Spindel Drones - a 3pl unaligned TROOP choice (limit 1 unit of 4 per army :() from Blackstone Fortress
2) a pair of Bore Worms - an unaligned elite choice of 1-2 models, 1PL per model. These little things can be removed from the table & in your next mv phase be set back up deep strike style.
Both are super useful for filling out those odd pts that would otherwise be wasted in many lists.
And the worm? It's tiny - on a 20mm(?) 15mm(?) base. Sooo easy to hide it in position to count for scoring, objectives, etc. while your real units take care of buisiness.
Sadly neither can gain xp.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/04 09:35:04


Post by: The Black Adder


I think it depends what you want out of the crusade league. If people want optimal choices then let them pick. If people are playing for narrative reasons then maybe just leave it to personal choice. If you want the fates to decide then roll a die (or even two and let either the player or their opponent pick from the two options).


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/04 13:11:18


Post by: Karol


ccs 798087 11114485 wrote:

I highly recommend adding the following models to your collection for Crusades:
1) Spindel Drones - a 3pl unaligned TROOP choice (limit 1 unit of 4 per army :() from Blackstone Fortress
2) a pair of Bore Worms - an unaligned elite choice of 1-2 models, 1PL per model. These little things can be removed from the table & in your next mv phase be set back up deep strike style.
Both are super useful for filling out those odd pts that would otherwise be wasted in many lists.
And the worm? It's tiny - on a 20mm(?) 15mm(?) base. Sooo easy to hide it in position to count for scoring, objectives, etc. while your real units take care of buisiness.
Sadly neither can gain xp.


Didn't knew unaligned units could score in crusade. That is really cool and good to know.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/04 15:13:47


Post by: Purifying Tempest


My favorite Crusade unit has to have been the Repentia I fielded once... and I'll never do it again

They had made it to Heroic, far faster than any other unit in their Order of Battle. Had some gruesome games, many many games overall... and had survived... 0 times. Basically any unit that had the feel of "Okay, played in 12 battles... survived 0" tickled me.

We typically played games based on the lower player's ability to field from his Order of Battle. So basically ask the person with the lower PL available what they wanted to play at... and then both players put an army together. It usually kept things civil, and allowed the person with the advantage in PL to maybe customize a little, but only based on the knowledge of what faction he was up against... or maybe more if they're paths had crossed before!

Regardless of anything else... we love Crusade, so much more than Matched Play especially. And I advocate just giving into PL. Crunching numbers to eek everything out of your list is cool and all... but not having to worry about that and just fielding the units the way you want them (for better and worse), is really liberating. Sure, you'll see units armed to the teeth with great gear... but that street goes both ways. Stop assuming your opponent is incapable of bringing swagged out units of his own

List building feels so much better when I am selecting units for their role, which is so much easier to accomplished when not having to worry about how every little upgrade affects the tuning of the list overall. Just too much headache there that saps the life out of the match.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/04 16:56:35


Post by: PenitentJake


Our campaign is moderated, and entirely narrative.

The planet is defended by Sisters and Guard, who each have full rosters available. We've created an NPC faction to represented houses of Imperial noble families.

In the shady underground, beneath the Imperial radar, two Cults are growing, capturing members a battle at time; if they get greedy and push too hard, too fast, they can be discovered and engaged by Imperial Forces.

One of the things we've had to do is use Crusade requisitions/ Battle Honours/ Scars with other systems. The first game we played was actually Space Hulk- the orignal 'Stealers that will seed the GSC had to escape from a Hulk to make planetfall.

Obviously, in Space Hulk, you don't play to agendas. So we award xp for kills. There were 8 automated escape pods; the map was designed to make it hard for more than 4 to escape and hard for fewer than four to escape. The Stealers received 1 rp if they got four away and two if they got eight away.

For small skirmish games, we use kill team rules but with the progression system from Crusade. At this stage, we're still using custom missions.

The campaign architecture borrow's from 8th edition's Urban Conquest/ Streets of Death campaign system. We've created our own territories, and there are a lot of custom missions ahead to guide the story.

There's a parallel campaign running in Commorragh as well; once the ascendant lord reclaims enough territory, they will be able to realspace raid into the sister campaign. One modification that we use to the Drukhari territory system is that some of the units have territorial reconnaissance; if these units participate in a battle and the Ascendant Lord earns a territory, they may chose any territory for which they have recon.

We keep recon rare, but it helps us advance the story if certain territories fall into the hands of particular groups at the right time.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/04 17:38:29


Post by: DarkHound


I hadn't really considered the "rich get richer" effect of rolling for Battle Honors, but it makes sense and further dissuades me from it. The players who win more get more rolls, and are more likely to hit key upgrades. We went at it purely from the feels-bad angle, like hitting ObSec+Shoot w/ Action buff hitting your Hormagants; the best play is to remove and re-add the unit and keep trying for hit the right upgrade at 6exp.

Purifying Tempest wrote:
And I advocate just giving into PL. Crunching numbers to eek everything out of your list is cool and all... but not having to worry about that and just fielding the units the way you want them (for better and worse), is really liberating. Sure, you'll see units armed to the teeth with great gear... but that street goes both ways. Stop assuming your opponent is incapable of bringing swagged out units of his own

List building feels so much better when I am selecting units for their role, which is so much easier to accomplished when not having to worry about how every little upgrade affects the tuning of the list overall. Just too much headache there that saps the life out of the match.
I get the convenience of PL. I also think it's great for really casual players, like kids, who just slapped on every upgrade in the box because it looks cool. The problem is, as soon as you start building coherently, you're going to abuse the PL system even incidentally. However, not every army can abuse it at the same rate. My 495pt AdMech patrol is 26 PL, but my 25 PL patrol (with a different loadout for PL) is 549 points. There's no guarantee that armies are going to be evenly matched and, personally, that idea is going to nag at me the whole game.

To your second point, selecting a unit for their role, I actually found that to be the case with points anyway. Like I said in the OP, you already can't fiddle with individual upgrades to tune the list (without spending RP). You build a unit and upgrade it for a job, and pick it in useful match-ups. Instead of fiddling with minor upgrades, you have small filler units in your OoB. That's true in PL too, you'll keep some 1-2 PL units to meet the cap.

 Inquisitor Lord Katherine wrote:
In general my secondaries were generally structured to award XP exclusively to my characters, and my other units just got by with the 1XP per battle:
[...]
Once the GMNDK and Librarian were maxed, it was almost a puzzle to figure out how to funnel XP to the Paladins without deliberately doing dumb things.
[...]
However, my army consistently felt vastly more powerful than his because my army of a small number of resilient units rarely suffered battle scars and never suffered them to its good units...
That's really interesting, because my experience with AdMech was basically the opposite. I didn't have super-heroes to pile buffs on, and the secondaries didn't really lend themselves to specific units for me anyway. There really weren't great upgrade choices past the second Honor for most of my units. My entire army was at least Blooded by being Marked for Greatness, with only a couple tanks hitting Honored by kills and Priority Target (kill tanks/monsters).

I think that elite armies have an advantage in theory. They can consolidate secondary experience more easily, essentially making it worth more, and avoid Scars more easily too.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/04 19:06:13


Post by: Inquisitor Lord Katherine


 DarkHound wrote:

 Inquisitor Lord Katherine wrote:
In general my secondaries were generally structured to award XP exclusively to my characters, and my other units just got by with the 1XP per battle:
[...]
Once the GMNDK and Librarian were maxed, it was almost a puzzle to figure out how to funnel XP to the Paladins without deliberately doing dumb things.
[...]
However, my army consistently felt vastly more powerful than his because my army of a small number of resilient units rarely suffered battle scars and never suffered them to its good units...
That's really interesting, because my experience with AdMech was basically the opposite. I didn't have super-heroes to pile buffs on, and the secondaries didn't really lend themselves to specific units for me anyway. There really weren't great upgrade choices past the second Honor for most of my units. My entire army was at least Blooded by being Marked for Greatness, with only a couple tanks hitting Honored by kills and Priority Target (kill tanks/monsters).

I think that elite armies have an advantage in theory. They can consolidate secondary experience more easily, essentially making it worth more, and avoid Scars more easily too.


My entire army also made it to the first level of honors, but that was basically just because we played about 12 or so games in the league and they got one point for each one they were in. After that, basically all the XP was funneled to my characters.
Psyker Characters are particularly easy to get XP to. Between Scry Battle Plans and Survivor you can easily net 10XP to the character just for being in the game before you account for a third agenda, marked for greatness, and units killed. I personally think Lord of the Warp is better than Scry Battle Plans, because even if it's not as much XP, your psyker is still participating and 7XP is still very respectable and you'll reach 51+XP very quickly anyway.


For noncharacters, Survivor or Sentinel are options to directly funnel XP to units, assuming you can keep them alive, which isn't as easy as keeping characters alive, but otherwise the getting of XP will be in some way dependent upon the unit having to outcompete the other units in your army.



As far as PL goes, there's no point to using points in Crusade. Units getting Battle Honors throws that all out of whack, so you might as well stick to the general guide of PL which will probably wind up being more accurate in the end. That said, no matter what, a Grandmaster Dreadknight with 6 Battle Honors is going to be worth a lot more than whatever cost to include him in the list indicates [but singlehandedly gives like 6 CP to the opponent].


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/04 19:20:27


Post by: General Kroll


Been playing Crusade for a few weeks now. I absolutely love it.

Try not to sweat too much about the difference between using points and power. Crusade isn’t meant to be perfectly balanced, it’s meant to be a chance to get your cool models out and make fun stories for them as they succeed or fail in their endeavours.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/04 21:06:16


Post by: NinthMusketeer


I think it is vitally important in crusade that the participants understand that the goal is fun thematic armies and not strict optimization as one would in matched play. A competitive mindset is anathema to crusade but so long as players can put that aside it is quite fun. It also means that the experience of crusade as a system can vary dramatically simply based on how competitive the local community is.

That said, I think the compensation of a player with less crusade points getting CP equal to half the difference is insufficient. IMO it should just be straight CP equal to the difference. If an opponent's force has 3 more crusade points than yours, you should get 3 extra CP.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/05 10:38:12


Post by: Nevelon


My crusade experience is a little skewed. It’s the only 9th I’ve played, and just with my son (who is 15, so not too young to understand the rules, but lacks my years of wargaming)

We choose rewards and roll damage.

I agree that things are getting more and more lethal as we level up. You can give marine squads BS2 w/rr 1s with two level ups. That’s a pretty solid bump in firepower. Defensively for squads you can get a 6+++, but I don’t think that balances. Characters have a lot more options to boost survivability.

PL and abilities can help make units viable in the format. Reivers are a good example. When you get both the graples and chutes for free, and can use an upgrade to give them ObSec, suddenly they are really good backfield disruption. Or giving boosts to charge ranges can make DSing units and getting them into CC less risky. You can also see more WL traits and relics when you can hand out the ones that aren’t the “must take” ones.

We were trying to organically get our force levels up, but it seems that once we started playing larger games, all our RP went into buying off damage from units. You play with 6 or more units, odds are one is going to take a hit. I guess loosing the XP is an option, but part of the fun is leveling up, and moving backwards is never entertaining.

I’ve not seen codexes other then the SM one, but there is some seriously nice stuff in there. Felt it’s lack when trying my nids out for a little 3 game side quest. Not just the agendas (the marine one where you get XP for making morale checks is money) but the tailored upgrades and relics.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/05 19:17:01


Post by: NinthMusketeer


The main advantage Tyranids have is no limitation on the number of units with adaptive physiology--just spend the requisition and you're good to go.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/05 19:20:50


Post by: PenitentJake


 Nevelon wrote:


I’ve not seen codexes other then the SM one,


The best so far is the Drukari dex; their Crusade content basically creates a set of rules for playing a Necromunda style game in Commorragh- it is absolutely incredible.

They've hinted at a path to Living Sainthood in the Sisters Crusade content. You can be sure that it will also include rules for swearing a Penitent Oath and for fulfilling that oath. It's going to be a game changer.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/05 20:01:39


Post by: DarkHound


NinthMusketeer wrote:That said, I think the compensation of a player with less crusade points getting CP equal to half the difference is insufficient. IMO it should just be straight CP equal to the difference. If an opponent's force has 3 more crusade points than yours, you should get 3 extra CP.
Nevelon wrote:We were trying to organically get our force levels up, but it seems that once we started playing larger games, all our RP went into buying off damage from units. You play with 6 or more units, odds are one is going to take a hit. I guess loosing the XP is an option, but part of the fun is leveling up, and moving backwards is never entertaining.
I think getting a whole CP per Crusade Point difference is a good idea. I was actually surprised looking at the rules again after 6 months to see it was only 1 per 2. Besides obviously combating power disparities directly, I think it'd also encourage leaving Battle Scars on units. I think accumulating minor, mildly detrimental effects is more interesting for narrative and flavour; mechanically you're incentivized to risk a debuff in exchange for a CP. Now, maybe the design team saw that and specifically wanted Battle Scars to feel like a punishment, but I think that's a missed opportunity. (Though the existence of Necron and Dark Eldar Battle Scar tables imply they like that idea.) That said, I still think the optimal strategy here is to take all the Battle Scars you can handle for extra CP anyway.

Inquisitor Lord Katherine wrote:...After that, basically all the XP was funneled to my characters.
[...]
For noncharacters, Survivor or Sentinel are options to directly funnel XP to units, assuming you can keep them alive, which isn't as easy as keeping characters alive, but otherwise the getting of XP will be in some way dependent upon the unit having to outcompete the other units in your army.
Nevelon wrote:I’ve not seen codexes other then the SM one, but there is some seriously nice stuff in there. Felt it’s lack when trying my nids out for a little 3 game side quest. Not just the agendas (the marine one where you get XP for making morale checks is money) but the tailored upgrades and relics.
I had noticed that armies end up taking the same agendas to boost particular units, basically regardless of the mission. For instance, I don't need experience on my infantry so I'll never touch most of the action agendas. It feels like a first iteration of the design space, though I appreciate the core ones had to be generic. Still, I miss the presence of mission-specific secondaries to provide novel choices.

I think the codex books have found a good way to incentivize diversifying agendas by providing additional rewards besides exp for very specific situations. The Necrons have interesting additional mechanics, with special Epithets and Battle Scars. However, I think they really started to hit their stride with the Death Guard codex and the Virulence Mechanic. The Dark Eldar are even better, so hopefully that trend continues and the Space Marines get some supplements to keep up.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/05 20:58:03


Post by: Nevelon


 NinthMusketeer wrote:
The main advantage Tyranids have is no limitation on the number of units with adaptive physiology--just spend the requisition and you're good to go.


I would assume you still have the limit to choosing each one once in your roster, similar to WL traits.

--

Some of the damage is irrelevant, so just helps to keep the crusade points down. The comms were blown off my speeder, so he can’t benefit from auras. Big loss, as he’s not core, and generally off doing his own thing. My JP captain had his leg blown off, which would be more of a drawback if I hadn’t picked up swift and agile. So that’s basically a wash. I keep throwing him into harms way though, aiming for that second wound so I can stick him in a dread.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/05 23:11:48


Post by: Cheex


I've run three Crusade campaigns with my local group. The first two were great and people were thoroughly engaged. The third...well, I think I tried to be too prescriptive (the setting was a space hulk, so players were encouraged to theme their armies to suit) and players lost interest when it was clear that one team couldn't possibly win and was fighting for a draw.

Tip #1a: make sure players are keeping track of their OOB. I recommend using Administratum.net and create a league for all players to join - this allows everyone to view the OOB of everyone else who has joined the league. When adding battle honours/scars and Crusade relics, I recommend summarising their effects in parentheses. e.g. Resilient (6+ FNP).

Tip #1b: Administratum has a print view output, much of which is weirdly laid out and hard to follow, but the "Battle Record Sheet" is extremely useful, especially if you follow the above suggestion of summarising the effects. I recommend getting players to print out just this one sheet (usually 1-2 pages) each time they come to the store.

Tip #2: encourage players to name their characters and squad leaders. This is not only good for the narrative, but it's a great psychological tool to help keep track of battle honours and scars - it's easier to remember that Sergeant Caius Jones can reroll morale than simply "Squad II" or whatever.

Tip #3: for battle honours/scars, I generally lean towards rolling for them unless you have a narrative reason to choose one. Did the unit level up in a game where they killed a character? Give them Headhunters or Veteran Warriors. Did the vehicle level up by stoically holding an objective? Give it Repair Systems. Did the character level up just by default but didn't kill anything? Roll the ability.

Tip #4: if you run a campaign with winners and losers, make sure there's always a way for everyone to win something. If the campaign has teams, the losing team(s) need to always have a chance to win, right up until the last battle. GW's campaign system from the Book of Rust is fine, but if one team has won the first two phases, it means the other team(s) can only draw at best, which is not a good motivator. I recommend making the final phase of the campaign worth one more point than the other phases combined. Or, as Campaign Master, provide a bonus campaign point if the losing team(s) can achieve a specific goal.

Tip #5: when choosing a battle size, I recommend picking a size that is a bit smaller than the supply limit of the player with fewer supplies. For example, if Player A has 75PL and Player B has 95PL, I recommend playing a game of 50-60PL. Try not to think of your OOB supply limit as being your "maximum battle size", because that shoehorns you into building your OOB as if it were an army for a specific game, and that can lead to boredom since you're just playing with the same army every time.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/06 00:37:30


Post by: H.B.M.C.


This thread makes me sad.

All I want to do is play Crusade... but at the same time my Tyranids don't have Crusade rules.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/06 00:48:53


Post by: PenitentJake


 H.B.M.C. wrote:
This thread makes me sad.

All I want to do is play Crusade... but at the same time my Tyranids don't have Crusade rules.


Yeah, I feel your pain. When you do get the rules though, they're going to be awesome. Hopefully it won't be too long.

If these shipping issues ever get worked out, and we can return to the previously planned pace, it'll come quick.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/06 00:57:22


Post by: DarkHound


Nevelon wrote:
 NinthMusketeer wrote:
The main advantage Tyranids have is no limitation on the number of units with adaptive physiology--just spend the requisition and you're good to go.
I would assume you still have the limit to choosing each one once in your roster, similar to WL traits.
H.B.M.C. wrote:This thread makes me sad.

All I want to do is play Crusade... but at the same time my Tyranids don't have Crusade rules.
My reading of Specialist Reinforcements is that you can use Progeny of the Hive as many time as you'd like, and I don't see any reason not to spam 5++ on your monsters. Plus you can give every character a Warlord trait, which Tyranids otherwise can't do.

There may not be Tyranid specific Crusade rules yet, but you can still have a blast creating your own monsters. Tyranids are primed to take advantage of Scry Batteplans, Lord of the Warp, Survivor, or Sentinel. Much like Lord Katherine's Grey Knights, Hive Tyrants and Broodlords are likely to run away with the game.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/06 01:14:55


Post by: H.B.M.C.


I realise this is kinda going off on a tangent, but can someone explain this:

"My reading of Specialist Reinforcements is that you can use Progeny of the Hive as many time as you'd like, and I don't see any reason not to spam 5++ on your monsters."

I always use 2x Dermic Symbiosis because monsters suck in 9th and it's about the only way to make a few big gunbeasts worthwhile.

Is what is said in that quote above mean that I can take more than 2 of that upgrade in a Crusade list?


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/06 01:41:01


Post by: Nevelon


 H.B.M.C. wrote:
I realise this is kinda going off on a tangent, but can someone explain this:

"My reading of Specialist Reinforcements is that you can use Progeny of the Hive as many time as you'd like, and I don't see any reason not to spam 5++ on your monsters."

I always use 2x Dermic Symbiosis because monsters suck in 9th and it's about the only way to make a few big gunbeasts worthwhile.

Is what is said in that quote above mean that I can take more than 2 of that upgrade in a Crusade list?


I just looked, and it does not seem like there is a restriction. I equate them with alternate warlord traits in my mind, so thought they were 1 per, no duplicates. But a quick scan of the docs I have on hand does not support this. You can spend RP to give units pre-battle upgrades like relics and WL traits, so no reason you shouldn’t be able to spam this for the whole roster.

So morph them all up. Mutations for everyone! You are going to hemorrhage crusade points, but get the extra whistles and bells to back it up.

One problem with playing only at home with my son is I lack people to bounce rules off of for serious discussion. He has enough issues focusing on the rules for his army, much less my tertiary one. And frankly almost nobody here talks about crusade.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/06 03:27:47


Post by: Inquisitor Lord Katherine


DarkHound wrote:My reading of Specialist Reinforcements is that you can use Progeny of the Hive as many time as you'd like, and I don't see any reason not to spam 5++ on your monsters. Plus you can give every character a Warlord trait, which Tyranids otherwise can't do.

There may not be Tyranid specific Crusade rules yet, but you can still have a blast creating your own monsters. Tyranids are primed to take advantage of Scry Batteplans, Lord of the Warp, Survivor, or Sentinel. Much like Lord Katherine's Grey Knights, Hive Tyrants and Broodlords are likely to run away with the game.


Oh yeah. Tyrants and Brood Lords are of a type that's pretty easy to turn into a megamonsters with focused XP dumping. Herohammer may not be what you came to Tyranids for, though. I picked GK over my other 5 armies specifically because they were a little more small-scale and character-driven, which would work better in crusade than like IG.

Cheex wrote:I've run three Crusade campaigns with my local group. The first two were great and people were thoroughly engaged. The third...well, I think I tried to be too prescriptive (the setting was a space hulk, so players were encouraged to theme their armies to suit) and players lost interest when it was clear that one team couldn't possibly win and was fighting for a draw.

Tip #1a: make sure players are keeping track of their OOB. I recommend using Administratum.net and create a league for all players to join - this allows everyone to view the OOB of everyone else who has joined the league. When adding battle honours/scars and Crusade relics, I recommend summarising their effects in parentheses. e.g. Resilient (6+ FNP).

Tip #1b: Administratum has a print view output, much of which is weirdly laid out and hard to follow, but the "Battle Record Sheet" is extremely useful, especially if you follow the above suggestion of summarising the effects. I recommend getting players to print out just this one sheet (usually 1-2 pages) each time they come to the store.

Tip #2: encourage players to name their characters and squad leaders. This is not only good for the narrative, but it's a great psychological tool to help keep track of battle honours and scars - it's easier to remember that Sergeant Caius Jones can reroll morale than simply "Squad II" or whatever.

Tip #3: for battle honours/scars, I generally lean towards rolling for them unless you have a narrative reason to choose one. Did the unit level up in a game where they killed a character? Give them Headhunters or Veteran Warriors. Did the vehicle level up by stoically holding an objective? Give it Repair Systems. Did the character level up just by default but didn't kill anything? Roll the ability.

Tip #4: if you run a campaign with winners and losers, make sure there's always a way for everyone to win something. If the campaign has teams, the losing team(s) need to always have a chance to win, right up until the last battle. GW's campaign system from the Book of Rust is fine, but if one team has won the first two phases, it means the other team(s) can only draw at best, which is not a good motivator. I recommend making the final phase of the campaign worth one more point than the other phases combined. Or, as Campaign Master, provide a bonus campaign point if the losing team(s) can achieve a specific goal.

Tip #5: when choosing a battle size, I recommend picking a size that is a bit smaller than the supply limit of the player with fewer supplies. For example, if Player A has 75PL and Player B has 95PL, I recommend playing a game of 50-60PL. Try not to think of your OOB supply limit as being your "maximum battle size", because that shoehorns you into building your OOB as if it were an army for a specific game, and that can lead to boredom since you're just playing with the same army every time.


#1: We kept track on scans of the sheets from the back of the book. Works pretty well, actually.

#3: I highly recommend not rolling for honors. It's drastically un-fun for basically everyone involved, and there's no good reason to do so over picking. Everybody will be happier if you pick, and there's literally no downside.

#5: Is definitely a good idea. What we did was an escalation league, so we started with however many PL, and after every four games we got an additional bunch of PL as commitment to the area of operations was increased. We could still spend our RP on more PL, which I did so that I could get some units into my order of battle earlier to get them a get up in experience. [it's not like I had anything else to spend RP on anyway, I was basically always floating at 5], which brings me to my actual point on organizing such a league:

I highly recommend removing the limit on RP, and also brainstorming your own mission rewards for each round or each game as the game organizer. While the limit exists to get you to spend it, there's often nothing to spend it on, so it is just lost and people don't feel like they're getting anything after about 10 or so games. It's particularly noticeable when you play a game where literally nobody can use the mission reward, so it doesn't matter who wins or loses, and this became the norm by the end of our 12 games. We didn't really have a stake in the game anymore because we were ineligible to receive the rewards.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/06 03:58:33


Post by: H.B.M.C.


 Inquisitor Lord Katherine wrote:
#3: I highly recommend not rolling for honors. It's drastically un-fun for basically everyone involved, and there's no good reason to do so over picking. Everybody will be happier if you pick, and there's literally no downside.
Is this because rolling randomly might see a HTH squad get a shooting buff, or vice versa?


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/06 04:00:43


Post by: Inquisitor Lord Katherine


 H.B.M.C. wrote:
 Inquisitor Lord Katherine wrote:
#3: I highly recommend not rolling for honors. It's drastically un-fun for basically everyone involved, and there's no good reason to do so over picking. Everybody will be happier if you pick, and there's literally no downside.
Is this because rolling randomly might see a HTH squad get a shooting buff, or vice versa?


Yes, also, particularly in narrative play, people want to you know, have the narrative of their people, so picking is important.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/06 06:23:15


Post by: ccs


Bleh. I completely disagree with simply picking your rewards.
You want to see units quickly become monsters? Then pick your rewards. It'll become real dull and predictable as you'll just map them out ahead of time. Then all you have to look forward to is checking off the xp boxes until you unlock reward xyz. Wash, rinse, repeat. And you won't "waste" any xp either on non-prefered upgrades.
If I could've just picked the optimal reward for my Necrons it'd have been much worse for my opponents. I fed xp into about 5 units for most of the Crusade hoping to role the perfect upgrades. If I could've just skipped that I'd have had even more units optimized....
Besides, seeing how your force randomly/organically evolves is part of the fun of the system.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/06 06:38:44


Post by: Racerguy180


Roll for it, picking is for matched play...

If you want to pimp out your units, expose them to danger....



Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/06 06:51:42


Post by: Cheex


 Inquisitor Lord Katherine wrote:
 H.B.M.C. wrote:
 Inquisitor Lord Katherine wrote:
#3: I highly recommend not rolling for honors. It's drastically un-fun for basically everyone involved, and there's no good reason to do so over picking. Everybody will be happier if you pick, and there's literally no downside.
Is this because rolling randomly might see a HTH squad get a shooting buff, or vice versa?


Yes, also, particularly in narrative play, people want to you know, have the narrative of their people, so picking is important.

This is why my approach is a hybrid. Got a narrative reason, even if it's not very deep, to get a specific Honour? Go for it. Your squad that made that last-turn dash to steal an objective deserves Fleet of Foot; your unit that survived with one model left deserves Grizzled; your Dreadnought that wrecked enemy vehicles all over the place deserves Armourbane.

I don't even care how flimsy your narrative reasoning is - the point is to get the players thinking about why things are happening.

Also, I can think of one good reason to roll: it reduces analysis paralysis. In my group, few of the players are dedicated enough to sit there pouring over Crusade rules between gaming days to figure out what they want for that important unit when it levels up. It's much easier to roll and apply an ability, and it gets things moving so they can play another game.

One other suggestion is to let players roll again if the ability they roll is redundant/useless (or even close to it). It would be literally pointless for a unit to get Grizzled if it already has a shrug save, for example.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/06 09:49:18


Post by: The Black Adder


ccs wrote:
Bleh. I completely disagree with simply picking your rewards.
You want to see units quickly become monsters? Then pick your rewards.


The idea with the crusade rules is that they support narrative play. I hesitate to say that if you're just picking all the min-max options you're doing it wrong, because it's your game so play it how you want, but we know it's not what the designers intended.

I'll be discussing the options with our group tonight and I'll be recommending we go with Cheex's approach. It strikes a good balance. I think we can all trust eachother not to make it boring and listen to feedback if we think somebody's picks are BS.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/06 10:21:51


Post by: Jidmah


Racerguy180 wrote:
Roll for it, picking is for matched play...

If you want to pimp out your units, expose them to danger....



I'd argue the other way around. If you want to play a competitive crusade (yuk.) you should roll to not have everyone immediately become super-heroes. In a narrative driven crusade, picking things that match the narrative is much more fun.

A cool idea from one of my peers was having the person who inflicted the wound pick what it does.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/06 13:58:10


Post by: Unit1126PLL


Yeah, rolling isn't "narrative".

Daemonettes getting +1 ballistic skill as a unit upgrade isn't narrative at all.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/06 14:13:01


Post by: Polonius


i think you can make arguments for and against rolling/picking upgrades. My shop has been rolling, but that was simply a consensus choice. I think it really comes down to what you're more afraid of: getting a suboptimal or even worthless result on your own stuff, or somebody building an unstoppable monster with layered buffs.

If I were to make a call, I guess I would gauge the overall "savviness" of the people playing. I could see newer players preferring randomness, while experienced players enjoy picking.

I think Power level is probably the same way, although I think that players overstate the downsides to Power Level. Yes, it does encourage you to run your units fat with upgrades,, because they're all "free." So if you have a lot of units optimized for efficient builds (LRBTs with only a hull heavy bolter, the Dakka Fex, etc.) then yeah, i guess Power Level does suck a bit. I think that it allows people that have built their stuff however, or with big collections, to use units that would never see the light of day due to their inefficient load outs.

Power level is also vastly easier for building lists, which is an upside when you roll into Crusade night, and end up play a 65 PL (roughly 1300 point) game. Building that list on the fly with PL is a breeze, while with Points it can take a while.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/06 14:23:48


Post by: PenitentJake


Yep- definitely a picker.

I always make my picks on story. This is easy enough to ensure if you've got a GM/ Moderator, but it could get a little awkward without one if your player base isn't on the same page.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/06 17:48:18


Post by: Inquisitor Lord Katherine


Whether you want to pick your traits to tell the story of your unit, or pick your traits because it's efficient, you are having more fun than randomly rolling. You don't even need to be on the same page, because it's more fun either way.

Ordering people to roll in order to spite the people who might enjoy having a strong combination of abilities is really coming from the wrong place in the heart; the intent is to have fun, not to spite competitive-type play. It's like shooting yourself in the foot to show your opponent how little you care about the race, because you're really degrading the enjoyment of everybody in your league so that people who either aren't in your league or are playing along and having fun with everybody else know how much you spit on them.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/06 19:13:40


Post by: tauist


While we're on the subject of Crusade, can I ask your opinions on a houserule we're contemplating on bolting onto our Crusade when we finally get to start one later this year?

We were thinking that in addition to starting with 50PL, there is also a PL cap for units we can add to our OOB's. This cap starts at 6PL; we cannot include any units which cost more than 6PL unless its a Troop category unit. Then, we can spend RPs to permanently increase the max unit PL throughout the entire Crusade (1RP per PL cap increase by 1). Doing this will prevent players from starting the Crusade with overly skewed/powerful units or HQs, and this will add further challenge to managing RPs.

What do you think?



Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/06 19:18:45


Post by: Polonius


 tauist wrote:
While we're on the subject of Crusade, can I ask your opinions on a houserule we're contemplating on bolting onto our Crusade when we finally get to start one later this year?

We weve thinking that in addition to starting with 50PL, there is also a PL cap for units we can add to our OOB's. This cap starts at 6PL; we cannot include any units which cost more than 6PL unless its a Troop category unit. Then, we can spend RPs to permanently increase the max unit PL throughout the entire Crusade (1RP per PL cap increase by 1). Doing this will prevent players from starting the Crusade with overly skewed/powerful units or HQs, and this will add further challenge to managing RPs.


With the caveat that if it works for your group, go for it: it's fiddly and solves a problem that doesn't exist. A single Dreadnought isn't going to break the game, even at combat patrol, and that's 7 PL! You'll just end up rewarding MSU army builds or armies with strong troops choices.



Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/06 20:18:40


Post by: NinthMusketeer


Roll rewards, with the option to spend one requisition to change the result to one of choice.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/06 20:35:35


Post by: tauist


 Polonius wrote:
 tauist wrote:
While we're on the subject of Crusade, can I ask your opinions on a houserule we're contemplating on bolting onto our Crusade when we finally get to start one later this year?

We weve thinking that in addition to starting with 50PL, there is also a PL cap for units we can add to our OOB's. This cap starts at 6PL; we cannot include any units which cost more than 6PL unless its a Troop category unit. Then, we can spend RPs to permanently increase the max unit PL throughout the entire Crusade (1RP per PL cap increase by 1). Doing this will prevent players from starting the Crusade with overly skewed/powerful units or HQs, and this will add further challenge to managing RPs.


With the caveat that if it works for your group, go for it: it's fiddly and solves a problem that doesn't exist. A single Dreadnought isn't going to break the game, even at combat patrol, and that's 7 PL! You'll just end up rewarding MSU army builds or armies with strong troops choices.


Everyone gets 5RP at the start of the Crusade IIRC.. This means that every player can level up to include max 13PL units before even the first battle is fought if they really want to. I dont really see it as fiddly as you make it out to be.

The main incentive for adding PL levelups was to give some other uses for RPs at the start of the Crusade, since you cant hold more than 5 at any time. I also think its an interesting way to making things escalate more as the Crusade develops.



Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/06 20:50:59


Post by: Polonius


 tauist wrote:
 Polonius wrote:
 tauist wrote:
While we're on the subject of Crusade, can I ask your opinions on a houserule we're contemplating on bolting onto our Crusade when we finally get to start one later this year?

We weve thinking that in addition to starting with 50PL, there is also a PL cap for units we can add to our OOB's. This cap starts at 6PL; we cannot include any units which cost more than 6PL unless its a Troop category unit. Then, we can spend RPs to permanently increase the max unit PL throughout the entire Crusade (1RP per PL cap increase by 1). Doing this will prevent players from starting the Crusade with overly skewed/powerful units or HQs, and this will add further challenge to managing RPs.


With the caveat that if it works for your group, go for it: it's fiddly and solves a problem that doesn't exist. A single Dreadnought isn't going to break the game, even at combat patrol, and that's 7 PL! You'll just end up rewarding MSU army builds or armies with strong troops choices.


Everyone gets 5RP at the start of the Crusade IIRC.. This means that every player can level up to include max 13PL units before even the first battle is fought if they really want to. I dont really see it as fiddly as you make it out to be.

The main incentive for adding PL levelups was to give some other uses for RPs at the start of the Crusade, since you cant hold more than 5 at any time. I also think its an interesting way to making things escalate more as the Crusade develops.


As I said, if your group really wants to encourage MSU at all cost, knock your socks off. Run with it.

But the more I think about it, the worse of an idea it is. Yes, you start with 5RPs, and most people use them on A warlord trait and relic, and then to bump up the requisition limit. I never struggled to spent RPs: you can buy warlord traits and relics for all characters, many armies have strategem upgrades that become RP things, and you always end up spending RPs to heal battle scars. Oh, and you need 10 RPs to be able to play full sized games. Having to spend 4 RPs to field Leman russes, or 9 RPs to field the Riptide, is a massive feel bad. Sure, Space marines love it, since they have a ton of great units at 6PL or under. Dark Eldar too, i'd imagine.

there's an old truism that really works against nearly effort to balance the game with a simple rule: no matter who cleverly you define your rules for preventing abuse, the stronger armies will continue to be good due to a deeper pool of options, while weaker armies will lose some of the few strong options they have.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/06 21:36:09


Post by: tauist


 Polonius wrote:
 tauist wrote:
 Polonius wrote:
 tauist wrote:
While we're on the subject of Crusade, can I ask your opinions on a houserule we're contemplating on bolting onto our Crusade when we finally get to start one later this year?

We weve thinking that in addition to starting with 50PL, there is also a PL cap for units we can add to our OOB's. This cap starts at 6PL; we cannot include any units which cost more than 6PL unless its a Troop category unit. Then, we can spend RPs to permanently increase the max unit PL throughout the entire Crusade (1RP per PL cap increase by 1). Doing this will prevent players from starting the Crusade with overly skewed/powerful units or HQs, and this will add further challenge to managing RPs.


With the caveat that if it works for your group, go for it: it's fiddly and solves a problem that doesn't exist. A single Dreadnought isn't going to break the game, even at combat patrol, and that's 7 PL! You'll just end up rewarding MSU army builds or armies with strong troops choices.


Everyone gets 5RP at the start of the Crusade IIRC.. This means that every player can level up to include max 13PL units before even the first battle is fought if they really want to. I dont really see it as fiddly as you make it out to be.

The main incentive for adding PL levelups was to give some other uses for RPs at the start of the Crusade, since you cant hold more than 5 at any time. I also think its an interesting way to making things escalate more as the Crusade develops.


As I said, if your group really wants to encourage MSU at all cost, knock your socks off. Run with it.

But the more I think about it, the worse of an idea it is. Yes, you start with 5RPs, and most people use them on A warlord trait and relic, and then to bump up the requisition limit. I never struggled to spent RPs: you can buy warlord traits and relics for all characters, many armies have strategem upgrades that become RP things, and you always end up spending RPs to heal battle scars. Oh, and you need 10 RPs to be able to play full sized games. Having to spend 4 RPs to field Leman russes, or 9 RPs to field the Riptide, is a massive feel bad. Sure, Space marines love it, since they have a ton of great units at 6PL or under. Dark Eldar too, i'd imagine.

there's an old truism that really works against nearly effort to balance the game with a simple rule: no matter who cleverly you define your rules for preventing abuse, the stronger armies will continue to be good due to a deeper pool of options, while weaker armies will lose some of the few strong options they have.


That's just it. I hate the idea that RPs are just for taking Relics and Warlord traits. That will just result in superherohammer to the max real fast. And needing 10RP to be able to play full sized games? What is a "full sized game" in Crusade? Sounds to me like you're still trying to shoehorn "2000pts matched play" paradigms into a Crusade game, whereas I feel like that's precisely the sort of gaming I am trying to take a break from with our Crusade games.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/06 22:11:17


Post by: Cheex


If you're just after things for people to spend their RPs on, then I don't think placing artificial limits and then making people spend expend a prescious resource to get back to normal is the way to do it.

A more interesting use of RPs would be to affect things like battle setup - e.g. spending RPs to influence who is attacker/defender or spending RPs to influence who chooses the mission being played. This would represent the commander using scouts to recon the battlefield or expending resources to outmanouver the enemy.

If you're just looking to curb powerful units in smaller games, then maybe a "soft limit" is better - e.g. units worth more than 15% of the agreed battle size limit are worth an extra Crusade Point for that battle.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/06 22:21:08


Post by: Unit1126PLL


My group trades RPs to buy alliances (and treacheries) in team games!


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/06 22:24:21


Post by: Cheex


 Unit1126PLL wrote:
My group trades RPs to buy alliances (and treacheries) in team games!

Oh, I like that...


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/07 00:53:01


Post by: Inquisitor Lord Katherine


On the subject of needing to spend RP to unlock higher PL units, I definitely don't think that's a good idea, as has been observed, you're just locking off huge tracts of people's codecies at an unequal rate, and most likely just telling people that they can't play with their toys, which is pretty much the opposite idea of having a crusade league.


As for the characters getting warlord traits and relics, it's going to happen, and I don't see anything wrong with it. Like, it's narrative, you're supposed to be telling the story of your people, why not have them have character traits? Also, like a warlord trait and relic are the least of your concerns for superhero hammer, given that it took like 6 games for my GMNDK to reach Legendary.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/07 01:47:54


Post by: Unit1126PLL


Yeah. Agreed with Katherine. If you are deliberate about how you XP a character you can pump them to the heavens quickly, especially if they start from an already quite powerful base model.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/07 03:00:08


Post by: Eihnlazer


Crusade has 2 major ways of play and one is alot more involved than the other.

Open Crusade: This is actually the BRB intended way to play and is very casual. You just make a crusade roster and play games against other Crusade rosters. No rules, or prizes or fancy comp. Just forge the narrative on each table with each opponent.

Theres no incentive to go super cheezy unless you just want to be super cheezy. Just make cool stories for your guys.

League Crusade: These are much more involved and should take place with a group of friends or at least acquaintances who already know each other or at least of each other. You should all agree to a set of rules on how many games per week/month and what limits on battle honors and relics you take. You should preferably make a planetary map and try to do it ala Risk Style where you try to take over the map.



Leagues are fairly common, and were pretty balanced until the 9th codex's came out, granting certain armies more things to play with than others.



Personally, im of the belief that you should actually only take relics if they make sense. Example would be of my Dawneagle Shield captain in one crusade. I picked him to be survivor for a game and litterally thats what he was. The rest of my army got tabled and he lived with 4 wounds (more than half). He got his extra xp and ranked up, earning the Bionics relic to replace the arm that got blown off in the battle.

A second example will be in a different crusade roster I played the Relic mission and won. Instead of giving the free relic to my shield captain, I gave it to the Vexilla who was actually holding the relic at the end of the game and won it for me. I gave him frenzon injectors.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/07 03:52:03


Post by: tauist


 Inquisitor Lord Katherine wrote:
On the subject of needing to spend RP to unlock higher PL units, I definitely don't think that's a good idea, as has been observed, you're just locking off huge tracts of people's codecies at an unequal rate, and most likely just telling people that they can't play with their toys, which is pretty much the opposite idea of having a crusade league.


As for the characters getting warlord traits and relics, it's going to happen, and I don't see anything wrong with it. Like, it's narrative, you're supposed to be telling the story of your people, why not have them have character traits? Also, like a warlord trait and relic are the least of your concerns for superhero hammer, given that it took like 6 games for my GMNDK to reach Legendary.


It took 6 games to reach Legendary? I think it should take at least five times as many games for that. There's obviously a disconnect in how Crusade games actually escalate, and what I'd thought playing it would be like. Doesn't feel like an RPG-style experience at all in that case.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/07 04:18:14


Post by: DarkHound


One experience for being there, 3 for being Marked, 4 for Survivor, occasional one for kills. Call it 8.5 per game, that takes 6 games to reach 51 for Legendary.

That's not even really min-maxing. Of course, you can coordinate more agendas, like Linebreaker or Psychic-whatever. The maximum, I think, is to take a fresh, psychic character into a Strike Force game with 3 Agendas. You take Survivor for 4, Scry Battleplans for 5, and Recovery Mission for 6, for a total of 19 experience per game. That's Legenday on game 3, and you only need to succeed Recovery Mission twice.

More practically? I think 6-8 is a good amount for a targeted unit to gain in a game. Agendas that affect multiple units tend to award 2 or 3. My units (mostly the tanks) were getting ~8 exp for one and 3-4 exp on a couple others per game. After 5 or 6 games I had most vehicles and characters Battle-honored, and most of my other units had hit Blooded incidentally.

The trouble is, many agendas (and particularly the most rewarding ones) target one unit. If you want a unit to have experience, then you choose those secondaries and you probably also want to Mark them. So naturally your key units grow pretty quickly, especially if you're playing Incursion levels.

In my experience, most factions would rather have three Battle-Honored units than one Legendary. It all depends.

Anyway, I suggest you get some practical experience under your belt before proposing house rules.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/07 19:36:27


Post by: Inquisitor Lord Katherine


 tauist wrote:
 Inquisitor Lord Katherine wrote:
On the subject of needing to spend RP to unlock higher PL units, I definitely don't think that's a good idea, as has been observed, you're just locking off huge tracts of people's codecies at an unequal rate, and most likely just telling people that they can't play with their toys, which is pretty much the opposite idea of having a crusade league.


As for the characters getting warlord traits and relics, it's going to happen, and I don't see anything wrong with it. Like, it's narrative, you're supposed to be telling the story of your people, why not have them have character traits? Also, like a warlord trait and relic are the least of your concerns for superhero hammer, given that it took like 6 games for my GMNDK to reach Legendary.


It took 6 games to reach Legendary? I think it should take at least five times as many games for that. There's obviously a disconnect in how Crusade games actually escalate, and what I'd thought playing it would be like. Doesn't feel like an RPG-style experience at all in that case.


Is that your experience, or what you think should be?

It's fairly easy to net 13+XP per game to a Psyker Character, though Scry Battle Plans [5] and Survivor [4]. Add in 1 for participating and 3 for marked for greatness, and that's almost a rank per game played.

I'm going to second DarkHound and suggest that you play some crusade to feel for how it actually handles as written before changing the base rules. I'm not sure what you mean by not like an RPG-experience. It's not an RPG; Dark Heresy or Black Crusade might be your bet for the former experience.

If I were to work on some houserules for a Crusade league, I would probably be to write up some custom missions and most importantly, to change up the victory rewards, because at least in our league, we reached a point around 10 games in where we were playing games where nobody could use the game rewards.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/17 09:18:27


Post by: Zustiur


In my limited experience, Crusade requires all players involved to agree not to cheese their rosters in such a way. No one should be picking the same unit for secondary rewards and marked for greatness every game, that's just breaking the system because you can.
Likewise, building competitive level lists should also be avoided. Instead, build your army to be more like a narrative appropriate army, for example, marines could work towards having a battle demi company.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/17 09:25:53


Post by: ccs


Zustiur wrote:
In my limited experience, Crusade requires all players involved to agree not to cheese their rosters in such a way. No one should be picking the same unit for secondary rewards and marked for greatness every game, that's just breaking the system because you can.
Likewise, building competitive level lists should also be avoided. Instead, build your army to be more like a narrative appropriate army, for example, marines could work towards having a battle demi company.


Oh you can make some quite powerful lists built narratively.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/17 11:11:13


Post by: Unit1126PLL


Much of this goes into my "Crusade isn't narrative. It's just a progression system." argument...


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/17 14:00:37


Post by: tauist


 Unit1126PLL wrote:
Much of this goes into my "Crusade isn't narrative. It's just a progression system." argument...


I think I'm starting to feel the same. The idea that supersoldiers of the future become legendary fighters after a few battles in some insignificant campaign doesn't sound very plausible to me, narratively speaking. We're talking about soldiers who have supposedly fought wars for decades, if not for hundreds or years.. By that logic, they'd all have maxed out and becme legendary heroes of the chapter during their first Campaign FFS



Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/17 14:51:43


Post by: DarkHound


 Unit1126PLL wrote:
Much of this goes into my "Crusade isn't narrative. It's just a progression system." argument...
Crusade is a progression system in the same way that DnD is a co-op fighting game. Both games provide opportunities for players to invest themselves, but it's necessarily down to the players to take that step. DnD may be the archetypal narrative game, but even so backgrounds and story elements can be weaponized while their flavour ignored; that's how murder-hobos are born. Lots of players don't make the extra effort on themselves to create a narrative, and words on a paper can't force them to act in good faith.

Plus it depends on the context of your games. If you're playing one-off pick-up games, obviously there's more work on your end to create a connective narrative. But at a minimum it's still a chronicle of a fighting force's experience. If you're playing in a league, especially with campaign attached, it's easier. I'm sure we'll get more campaign books to run too.
 tauist wrote:
I think I'm starting to feel the same. The idea that supersoldiers of the future become legendary fighters after a few battles in some insignificant campaign doesn't sound very plausible to me, narratively speaking. We're talking about soldiers who have supposedly fought wars for decades, if not for hundreds or years.. By that logic, they'd all have maxed out and becme legendary heroes of the chapter during their first Campaign FFS
I think the characterization "soldiers who fought wars for decades" is misleading. Plenty of fresh Marines die and never progress, and have to be replaced with more freshly minted Marines. It's like the Traitor Legions: the typical troopers are not the ones who fought on Terra during the Heresy, despite the claim of 10,000 of battle. Those guys are all Chaos Lords and Daemon Princes or dead (or worse).

The battles we play are symmetrical, pitched battles and insanely lethal. By the fact that you're playing it, it's not an insignificant campaign. It's kind of campaign that creates the veterans who get promoted to lead and teach. You'd never argue an Intercessor from a "legendary" squad is as powerful as a Captain, they're just ready to become a more elite unit or else be broken into sergeants or lieutenants. Hell, you could argue there's a flow and reallocation of soldiers within the company between missions. Fresh recruits replace losses in the veteran squad and are brought to par, but also parts of that squad are promoted to replace losses in your elite units as well. You can rationalize the rules lots of ways for narrative flavour.
Zustiur wrote:
In my limited experience, Crusade requires all players involved to agree not to cheese their rosters in such a way. No one should be picking the same unit for secondary rewards and marked for greatness every game, that's just breaking the system because you can.
Likewise, building competitive level lists should also be avoided. Instead, build your army to be more like a narrative appropriate army, for example, marines could work towards having a battle demi company.
I am fundamentally opposed to enforcing rules on how other people should have fun. Not everyone is going to agree on what is cheese and what is narrative appropriate. My army has pages of backstory (I'm a professional writer by trade) and that informs my unit choices, but I'm still going to build good armies and properly equip them because that's fun too. Of course, this is a casual game mode so being courteous means you make concessions to improve the other person's fun. You help the disadvantaged player have more fun, you don't clamp down on someone having fun.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/17 15:10:30


Post by: Unit1126PLL


A real narrative ruleset would not require "rationalization" of the rules to make narrative sense.

Promoting units to officers would actually be a narrative consequence (e.g. a Legendary sergeant using Lieutenant rules or becoming a Lieutenant outright) but that doesn't work within the rules. Remember limit 3!


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/17 15:26:23


Post by: DarkHound


Then what you're chaffing against is the granularity of the rules. There's nothing stopping you from adding a lieutenant to your army and saying he's the former sergeant. Hell, you can even write it down in their data-sheet. Still, you can't create rules for every possible outcome, and trying to systematize everything runs into rules bloat.

Using DnD as an example again, I think 5e being rules-lite on the narrative side is a good thing. It provides more room for the players to create their own stories.

At the end of the day, it's still a game and has to function well. You could nit-pick any rule they create as not providing ample narrative until the game becomes a 1:1 simulation. Ultimately it's up to the player to create narrative within an abstracted system.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/17 16:55:02


Post by: Unit1126PLL


There is a difference between abstraction (what makes wargames playable) and rationalization.

In places where the rules don't cover things it is easy. In places where the rules outright contradict the narrative, not so much. You have to rationalize the rules away.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/17 17:04:42


Post by: PenitentJake


 Unit1126PLL wrote:
A real narrative ruleset would not require "rationalization" of the rules to make narrative sense.

Promoting units to officers would actually be a narrative consequence (e.g. a Legendary sergeant using Lieutenant rules or becoming a Lieutenant outright) but that doesn't work within the rules. Remember limit 3!


Ro3 is now a part of the GT mission pack if I'm not mistaken. I don't think it applies to Crusade.

As for not requiring "rationalization," I've been playing pen and paper role playing games since I was 8 years old, and I've had to rationalize rules in almost all of them. Understanding how a rule's game mechanics are supposed to represent story events is at the core of narrative gaming. Every time I level in D&D, I think about all the things my character did since last leveling in order to have some insight into how the character should grow- using my self generated "fluff" to justify the crunch I purchase with my XP.

As for promotions: yeah, they could have gone further, though some pathways for promotions do exist. Captain to Chapter Master is one; the Requisition that allows squad leaders to be equipped with Relics... Not exactly a promotion, but certainly a form of recognition. DW Marines can develop specialisms in game (again, no requirement to base the specialism on the battlefield actions which supply the experience to purchase the upgrade, but the people who have RPG experience usually do). In fact, DW captains can become Masters of Specialisms as well.

The Drukhari Crusade content has been the best so far- the rules for Ascendant Lord/ territory acquisition and use, I would argue, come closest to moving beyond a progression system- these rules basically create a Necromunda style mini-game set in Commorragh.

The Crusade content isn't out for sisters yet, but we'll have it soon; a pathway to living sainthood has been teased in the previews, though Warcom is notorious for mistakes like this, so I will hold at "Cautious optimism" until we get more info. I suspect that sisters will be able to take and complete the oath of Sisters Repentia, etc.





Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/17 17:28:48


Post by: Unit1126PLL


Ro3 is a core rule this edition.

And again, what you are describing as "rationalization" is really just understanding the abstraction. I have no problem with understanding wargame abstractions.

I do have a problem when the rules don't abstract what is happening any longer, but rather directly contradict it. Then you start having to come up with contorted rationalizations to work your way around the rules.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/17 17:40:42


Post by: Rihgu


I cannot find any reference to Rule of Three or a limit to 3 copies of a datasheet otherwise in the Core or Advanced Rules. The only reference I can find is in the GT2020 Rules pack and Eternal War Matched Play rules.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/17 17:45:12


Post by: Unit1126PLL


Rihgu wrote:
I cannot find any reference to Rule of Three or a limit to 3 copies of a datasheet otherwise in the Core or Advanced Rules. The only reference I can find is in the GT2020 Rules pack and Eternal War Matched Play rules.


You are right, narrative allows more than 3 datasheets. I think I am confused because no one locally would let me violate it for my Crusade games even with other Crusade armies or in our Crusade campaign.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/17 18:48:00


Post by: PenitentJake


 Unit1126PLL wrote:


And again, what you are describing as "rationalization" is really just understanding the abstraction. I have no problem with understanding wargame abstractions.

I do have a problem when the rules don't abstract what is happening any longer, but rather directly contradict it. Then you start having to come up with contorted rationalizations to work your way around the rules.


So maybe you could tell us which rules are requiring which kind of rationalizations? I'm particularly interested in the the rules that you feel directly contradict "what is happening."


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/17 18:57:43


Post by: AnomanderRake


PenitentJake wrote:
...So maybe you could tell us which rules are requiring which kind of rationalizations? I'm particularly interested in the the rules that you feel directly contradict "what is happening."


Flamers as AA. Forcing units to fire at the closest target, and then placing the closest target somewhere they can't see. Antenna-to-antenna line of sight. Killing tanks by stacking buffs on guys with knives. Moving and firing doesn't give you any penalty so long as you're also shooting at night. Blasts doing the same damage to a single target as they do to a squad. Too many bizarre army list decisions to count (i.e. why do the loyalist SM get to keep their Cataphractii armour but Chaos doesn't?).


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/17 19:05:36


Post by: Rihgu


I think PenitentJake and Unit are talking about the Crusade rules, in a "narrative vs progression system" context? That's how I read it.

Unless I misread and Unit is saying the core rules are non-narrative so that Crusade by extension can not be narrative? But I thought that's why they acknowledged the difference between abstraction and rationalization...


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/17 19:08:39


Post by: AnomanderRake


To me the core rules to 9e 40k are so abstract and nonsensical I get kicked out of any kind of narrative immersion so fast I don't have time to tell the difference between "narrative play" and "matched play".


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/17 19:26:00


Post by: NinthMusketeer


To me 40k battles are us playing out the key point within a larger context. Off the sides of our little board there are thousands of grunt troops fighting it out, there's a larger facility about to get blown up, there's a gathering of leaders about to be assassinated, and so on. That's the only context in which the battles make sense to begin with anyways.

Similarly there are probably a ton of other battles which a crusade force gets into which aren't played out because they amount to 50 PL of SoB clearing out 10 PL of cultists. Battles in a crusade campaign could easily be years apart, certainly there has been time for the units involved to recover at least.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/17 20:43:20


Post by: DarkHound


I've always thought of it the same way. Both that "cinematic" battles are between huge power disparities, and that realistic generalship and warfighting is about leveraging force disparities. As an aside, that's an aspect I always felt was lacking in wargames: battles are not symmetrical, and generalship is about the larger picture of the theatre of war.

Anyway, I've also always thought of games as the centre of a maelstrom: either there are troops literally just off the table edge, or the battle is one of several in the area. An army isn't 30 guys and a few tanks. Your list and Order of Battle is more like the personal guard of the commander, or the elite company used in the key battles. Even in the case of combat patrol, it's two forward parties skirmishing ahead of the armies. That's why I liked the old Dawn of War deployment in 5th; you start with only your HQ and 2 Troops each, night fighting is in effect, then the rest of your army arrives from reserves over 2 or 3 turns (the game could potentially go to turn 7 then).


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/17 21:53:10


Post by: Unit1126PLL


I'm talking about the core rules and their intersection with crusade.

You know what influences the way your units get buffs in Crusade? The order in which your units open fire. Of course, narratively, shooting happens at roughly the same time - my fire prism Luminous Purifier doesn't wait until the other two Fire Prisms have shot to take its blast at the enemy Baneblade - narratively, all 3 combined their fire to knock the tank out. But only one gets the XP for titanslayer! The order in which things happen affects battle experience in a way that's totally not narrative - if all 3 tanks cooperated to kill that tank, how come only one "learns" from it?

Or units with Blast. 3 units of 10 guardsmen inhibit my ability to get the "Cull the Horde" agenda in a way that one unit of 30 Conscripts wouldn't - why is the administrative division of the enemy force affecting how much battle experience my units get?

There's just two examples off the top of my head.

As for the "center of the maelstrom" problem, I've always disliked that argument, only because things are so damn lethal. If you think a trio of Basilisks can ace an intercessor squad at 36" real nice, imagine if you were actually a small part of a larger battle! Those poor intercessors would get aced by an artillery unit that doesn't even have to be in the same store...



Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/17 23:45:26


Post by: NinthMusketeer


That taps into another issue entirely, some people might say the inclusion of things such as artillery in games the scale of 40k is pretty silly...


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/18 01:36:37


Post by: Inquisitor Lord Katherine


On the subject of duration and the rate your guys level up:

I actually think they're pretty close to on the mark with regards to how fast guys level. Consider the following:

The system is designed to provide the tools for running an RPG-like narrative campaign. Like how many league periodically set up Dawn of War-style maps and conquests [which is something the crusade rules happen to slot perfectly into doing. All you need in a map]. The "level 1-20 progression" of the system theoretically covers the course of one of these campaigns, so given that most of these campaigns last about 3 to 6 months, having an average of about 12 games to get a guy to "max level" is fairly on the mark from a design perspective. It doesn't really matter what the perspective comparison with the rest of the random game lore is, it's about your dudes and their adventure. Like you your own D&D character can go from level 1 to 20 in their own story in an established setting like FR or Eberron or Greyhawk or whatever without the various canned NPC's from the background having any relevance to them.

As a side note, consider that even at the end of the day, your guy fought in and survived around a dozen presumably important-ish battles. This is actually quite a lot.



Unit1126PLL wrote:A real narrative ruleset would not require "rationalization" of the rules to make narrative sense.

Promoting units to officers would actually be a narrative consequence (e.g. a Legendary sergeant using Lieutenant rules or becoming a Lieutenant outright) but that doesn't work within the rules. Remember limit 3!


I'm not sure this needs to be something with a special crusade stratagem or something; just add a lieutenant to your force.


NinthMusketeer wrote:That taps into another issue entirely, some people might say the inclusion of things such as artillery in games the scale of 40k is pretty silly...


This depends on what you consider the scale of 40k. At the tactical scale of a reinforced/mixed company [which is what I think 40k is], artillery elements are definitely an appropriate inclusion.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/18 03:34:45


Post by: Rihgu


I'm not sure this needs to be something with a special crusade stratagem or something; just add a lieutenant to your force.

I can see the issue here, narratively.

If your squad levels up and gains a battle honor to say, always fire overwatch, and you requisition special issue wargear for your sergeant (master crafted power sword, or something), and then you promote him by adding a Lt to your force...

That Lt can't always fire overwatch, and doesn't have his special sword any more! So did he bequeath his weapon onto the new sergeant? Does his new role as Lt take away so much focus from the battle that he can more easily be caught by surprise from charging enemies?


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/18 03:53:32


Post by: DarkHound


Sure, why not? He also gains a bunch of abilities he didn't have before. I mean, that's your role as the narrator: make a story. The rules can't exhaustively prescribe mechanics for narration without being detrimental to the game by becoming too cumbersome to play.

There's plenty of other ways a narrative system could be built while being fun to play. Look at Kill Team: they progress up a specialization tree rather than taking disparate traits and equipment. But there's pros and cons to every system. I think some of the progression issues will be smoothed out with more 9th ed codexes and supplemental material.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/18 10:45:39


Post by: Nevelon


There is the thing for interring marines in dreadnoughts. You could do something similar for promoting out of squads. Remove old unit from your roster, add new one with the same XP.

What do you do with the old squad though? They just lost their sarge. Is someone from another squad going to be put in charge of theirs? Promote from within? Break up the whole unit; assume some go to the 1st company, maybe one goes to be a sarge in the 10th, etc? Have them loose a lot of XP that they will need to regain? Which is not a drawback if you’ve already maxed them on rewards.

From a mechanics POV, probably easier to just remove the unit entirely. Keeps things simple, prevents you from getting 2 high level units for the price of one. From a narrative POV, assume they are reassigned.

While promotion from the ranks makes sense in some armies, less so in others. Eldar Exarchs are locked into their shrines.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/25 23:51:53


Post by: DarkHound


Hey well, Goonhammer put out their article for the new AdMech Crusade rules. Much my relief, the central mechanic has more depth than the Warhammer Community article made it appear. AdMech armies will use their agendas to gain components, which they can spend to upgrade their units' weapons (yes, the whole squad), or create crazy unique relics by combining different categories of effects (108 combinations, apparently).

I think this does a great job of aligning the player's goals with the narrative goals of the faction. You need a lot of parts to consistently do cool stuff, so you're going to focus really heavily on completing those agendas. The mission becomes an excuse to dig for tech or steal it off the enemy's biggest tank. I can definitely imagine situations where I'd be torn between securing parts or securing the win. I think this goal alignment is one of coolest things games can achieve in general. It continues to be a good sign for Crusade rules going forward.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/05/26 04:22:56


Post by: Cheex


I dig it (pun not intended). Makes me want to start up a Dark Mechanicum force just for Crusade...


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/03 05:36:50


Post by: DarkHound


It's my thread, so I'll bring it back if I want.

I just got back from the first game of my shop's Crusade league. One thing I did not anticipate was how crazy the missions and custom rules are. Honestly, I hadn't looked at the Beyond the Veil rules. We were playing Combat Patrol, 25PL. We rolled the mission Powerspike: two objectives are near the defender and score 15 points each. Either player can sabotage an objective as an action (completed in your next Command phase), which awards the Attacker 15 points at the end of the game. The defender could use this to consolidate their forces and outscore the opponent if they were confident.

I won the roll and chose to be the defender. Then we rolled the setback Faltering Deployment: divide your army evenly into 3 parts, deploy 1 normally, 1 comes in from reserve on turn 1, and the last comes in on turn 2. The objectives can't be reached by units on the turn they arrive, so suddenly the defender can't reliably hold objectives. Worse, my army relies on a Techpriest buffing the Vanguard (which won't apply the turn they come in from reserve) but the opponent could deploy a Redemptor Dreadnought first to counter them. It was a tough decision from the first deployment, and the game only had twists and turns from there.

What stood out to me was that the game had more difficult tactical decisions than most of my competitive games. My opponent and I had a gentleman's agreement to play hard. Whether the mission was actually balanced wasn't really relevant, it was a unique challenge to find the line toward victory in the midst of chaos. In a competitive game, you know your list, and you know the mission, and you've got a good understanding of your opponent; all you need to do is navigate the dice rolls (which is certainly a challenge, don't mistake me). Whether you win or not, how you solve the puzzle is way more interesting to me, and that mission was a puzzle.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/03 07:24:23


Post by: ccs


So, did you win?


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/03 11:43:08


Post by: H.B.M.C.


Yeah man. That sounds awesome, but you didn't finish the story!!!


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/03 12:28:46


Post by: PenitentJake


Tell us the story of the unit you chose to be Marked for Greatness- what was the deed that earned them the distinction?

To me, this almost always cooler than just the story of who won and how.

Glad you enjoyed the game!


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/03 17:57:09


Post by: DarkHound


Aw, you guys are sweet. I didn't want to indulge unprompted, so here's the story.



I was scared by the prospect of Vanguard vs a Redemptor and deployed the Neutron Laser Dunecrawler first, in the back left corner. That was my first mistake, the Vanguard could have easily weathered the Redemptor if their buffs were active, in cover. My opponent deployed the Redemptor anyway, in the opposite cover behind obscuring terrain. My first turn, the Dunecrawler took the objective and took the firing lane in the middle of the board.

Then I made a two-fold mistake when I deployed my Vanguard. I hadn't read the deployment setback rules carefully because my opponent was reading it off his phone. I deployed my Vanguard and Manipulus wholly with my deployment zone 6", unable to reach the objective, because that's how reserves work. The first mistake is this setback makes you deploy 9" from your table edge, so I could have deployed on to the objective. I had a plan to sabotage the right objective and fall back to hold the left, but I couldn't reach it. My second mistake was trying to do it anyway. Instead I should have deployed them toward the left objective, behind the obscuring terrain as best I could.

Now, another two part mistake on my opponent's turn. He mistakenly brings his first Intercessor squad with the Captain in from reserves 9" away from my Vanguard in the building, outside my deployment zone. What's funny is, I had forgotten about Infoslave Skull to shoot arriving reserves until I was scrambling through my notes trying to find a way to save my Vanguard. I hadn't even written it in my notes because I thought it wouldn't come up in a Combat Patrol game. That's the second part of the mistake. I pop Enriched Rounds and dump dice at the Intercessors, killing 2 and half (would have been the squad with the Manipulus' AP-1 buff). Then the Vanguard eat the shooting phase: 8 die. I grit my teeth, roll the die, against all odds pass morale with a 1.

Turn 2, and finally we score 15 points. I advance the Vanguard and Manipulus into the ruin. I move the Neutron Dunecrawler down to fire at the Intercessors, and bring the other Dunecrawler on just in range to run on to the objective to potentially contest it. I figure I can just ignore the Redemptor, so I fire the Icarus into the Marines and deal 1 wound (oof). The Captain has a 4++, so I decide to fire the Neutron Laser at the 2 Intercessors and hope to overwhelm the Captain with Enriched Rounds. The Neutron kills both, and the Captain only takes a wound.

On my opponent's turn 2, he brings his Intercessors on 9" from my Neutron Dunecrawler (spoilers from the photo, he makes it). Neither the Redemptor nor the Captain can make it within 3" of the other objective, so they move forward. The Redemptor puts 12 wounds on the Icarus, and I've got to CP re-roll the 5++; I hit it and keep the Dunecrawler alive with 2 wounds. I also manage to fail a couple 2+ saves and lose two more Vanguard. The Intercessors make their charge and contest the objective (and deal a wound to my tank).

As usual, the game speeds up from here. The Intercessors stop me from scoring turn 3, but I kill them in melee. He moves on to the right objective, and Redemptor kills the Vanguard and puts 7 wounds on the Neutron Laser. I score on turn 4, repair the Neutron Dunecrawler to top bracket, and it puts 8 wounds back on the Redemptor. He scores on turn 4, putting us to 30-15. He pays 2 CP to put the Redemptor on top bracket and barely gets the kill on the Neutron Dunecrawler. Going into turn 5, he was thinking he could complete the Sabotage action with his Captain at the end of the turn to score 15 more for a tie. So my plan was to use 3"M doctrina, repair the Icarus array to top bracket, shoot the Redemptor to its bottom bracket (or kill it), then charge and survive the combat to prevent the action by proximity. The Icarus wiffs its damage, charges in anyway, eats 9 damage and auto-explodes out of spite to no effect. Then we check the rules to find the action completes next turn, so we agree the commanders both performed the league house-rule action to gain 1 xenotech point for our teams. The game ends 45-30, and the Manipulus completes his agenda by being the lone survivor.

I haven't decided who I'm going to mark for greatness yet. It's between the Manipulus and the Neutron Dunecrawler, both scoring a kill. I think if I had played the Vanguard properly, they could have hosed down the Intercessors and earned the distinction. Then again, they did make a miracle morale pass, and their Rad-saturation is what really made the Manipulus shine in melee. If the Neutron had survived turn 4, it would have iced the Redemptor and been a shoo-in. Tough to say. I'll have to pick before the game next week. What are your thoughts?


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/03 21:58:37


Post by: PenitentJake


Oh man- whichever tech priest wired that infoslave skull is going to answer to the Omnissiah for his negligence!

I'd almost Mark your Vanguard for that legendary stand and their utter fearlessness! It may not have translated to much in game terms, but those "Against All Odds" moments really stick out.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/04 00:37:30


Post by: H.B.M.C.


Now I really want to build my AdMech army...


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/04 01:52:50


Post by: PenitentJake


 H.B.M.C. wrote:
Now I really want to build my AdMech army...


I've been getting my store guy to keep stacks of stuff at the store because I don't like making a lot of trips. So the day the sisters dex arrives in store, I get to pick up my admech dex, my sisters dex, 3 issues of Marneus Calgar and two White Dwarfs plus the models I need to pick up two collector coins and the case.

It's going to be EPIC.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/04 02:17:36


Post by: NinthMusketeer


It definitely seemed like you guys were having a lot of fun in that battle, but I didn't realize how epic it really was.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/04 02:18:57


Post by: H.B.M.C.


Uhh... I just want to play Crusade.

But I want my Tyranid Crusade rules first.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/04 02:25:48


Post by: DarkHound


NinthMusketeer wrote:It definitely seemed like you guys were having a lot of fun in that battle, but I didn't realize how epic it really was.
Oh absolutely, and I realize I glossed over some more drama. After rolling that 5++ for my first Dunecrawler to avoid death, I had to immediately make a 50/50 to save against his 2 damage rocket launcher. And again, when the Neutron Laser died it was another 50/50 from that rocket for the Dunecrawler's last wound.
H.B.M.C. wrote:Uhh... I just want to play Crusade.

But I want my Tyranid Crusade rules first.
Oh just get in there. I don't actually have a copy of the AdMech book for its Crusade rules yet (the shop ran out immediately). So far I'm playing with the base book and it's great.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/04 04:05:42


Post by: NinthMusketeer


Having tried it, I would say the opposite. Tyranids are really unrewarding in crusade. The mechanics do not reward the play styles Tyranids generally go for, but mostly it is the theme. Having a unit with the 'veterans' reward or a 'digital weapons' relic doesn't work with the narrative of the army. Yeah you can re-fluff it as something else but that makes things a bit hollow. Couple that with a codex that does a piss poor job of representing the narrative of Tyranids as an army already and it is just a recipe for an unsatisfying experience. Because in crusade that narrative feel is a huge part of the picture.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/04 04:50:25


Post by: H.B.M.C.


That's what I'm afraid GW will do with Crusade 'Nids.

I've said it before - may have even been this thread - but I'm just certain that GW's interpretation of Crusade for the Tyranids will be ways of enhancing single creatures, as they "build a legend" or whatever, which is the opposite of what Tyranids should be.

Tyranids shouldn't build characters via veterancy. They're not 'heroes'. They're eminently disposable creatures who will all die once their task is completely anyway. There's no "I'll get you next time, Gadget!" from Hive Tyrants. No "Last time we faced one another I was but the learner, now I am the master!" from Neurothropes. They are all extensions of a singular Hive Mind. Individually they don't matter.

They should overcome obstacles by adaptation and mutation, but I'm sure that GW will just end up giving Tyranid HQs a bunch of titles that grant special rules ("Your Broodlord gained the 'Parasite of Mortex' title, and now causes an extra Mortal Wound on a To Wound roll of 6 in melee!").



Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/04 05:42:42


Post by: DarkHound


I think that's too pessimistic, and not reflective of the examples we've had so far. Every crusade rule so far (except the Space Marines) has dived into some unique angle for the faction, and they aren't about building one particular character.

Death Guard have to gather virulence to construct and modify a plague. The Drukhari are about leveraging their spoils to take territory and build an empire in Commorragh. The AdMech scavenge alien parts to build strange, unique relics, and also (more significantly) to upgrade the equipment of their army.

While they can't ditch gaining experience and veterancy, because it's the central reward system of Crusade, you can bet your bottom dollar that the Tyranid's meta-currency will be bio-mass. It wouldn't surprise me if the meta-game for their Crusade rules is about the stages of an invasion.

While the individual characters don't matter, Tyranids are probably the best example of a faction that gets smarter and stronger with experience. It's not the same Hive Tyrant leading every battle, but the experience it gains is transferred to every replica. It would also would not surprise me if they have the most Battle Trait tables so far, to represent modifying particular strains of units in ways unique to that unit. But now I'm just speculating.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/04 06:14:39


Post by: H.B.M.C.


I'm being pessimistic because Tyranid players haven't had any reason not to be for a decade now. Cruddace somehow messed up two books in a row, and we don't even know who's responsible for the current one.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/04 19:38:57


Post by: NinthMusketeer


My ideal picture would be Tyranid units do not gain experience or rewards save Hive Tyrants (which exist as sub-entities within the hive mind endlessly respawning into new bodies, see Swarmlord). Instead specific strains gain experience, representing the adaptations added to deal with the particular war. So instead of hormagaunt unit A having it's own xp total along with hormagaunt unit B, and so on, the xp goes to 'hormagaunts'. It doesn't matter if they are wiped out or have a different unit number/size every game because it is the fleet putting adaptations on all the hormagaunts it spawns. Disallow the normal crusade upgrades entirely and give Tyranids extra charts with rewards against specific weapons/foes. The sort of thing that would be too niche for matched play but in a crusade league can be tailored to fight the other armies in the league.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/04 21:07:20


Post by: Karol


Wouldn't it just mean that instead of having to upgrade one unit of hive guard depending on how it does in the game, all the hive guard units or all the dimas would getting upgraded at the same time, litteraly double or triple dipping on the speed of upgrades?


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/04 21:24:04


Post by: DarkHound


Yeah, I was thinking something similar in my post, but I didn't say explicitly because it's a pretty far departure from the normal systems. The problem is, mechanically, sharing experience leads to spamming the unit you invested in (even assuming you solve the issue of getting your investment multiplied). I think having some counter-balancing mechanic to dilute the power of upgrades based on the amount you bring would be too fiddly and prone to unintended outcomes.

A bigger problem than any of that is: what if the player doesn't want the same upgrades on every unit of Hormagaunts? Or a better example: Carnifexes. If the upgrades apply evenly, then you're penalized for using shooting and melee Carnifexes. I think for play experience, you're still better of upgrading separate units as patterns the Hive Fleet is replicating, rather than imagining they make literally all Hormagaunts to be the same.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/04 23:25:45


Post by: NinthMusketeer


If a player really wants to spam hormagaunts, or carnifex, or whatever it may be, let them. Rewards now aren't enough to incentivize people now to max out unit size whenever possible, and certainly if the rewards stacked so well as to overcome the inherent disadvantages of spamming one unit then there is a problem with the rewards.

Different wargear would obviously have to be a different 'strain' (like how Thornback and Screamer-Killers are) because otherwise the problems are like you said. Makes a lot more sense than 'oh the hive fleet devised these helpful adaptations but only on exactly one unit in any given force'.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/05 09:28:42


Post by: Jidmah


NinthMusketeer wrote:My ideal picture would be Tyranid units do not gain experience or rewards save Hive Tyrants (which exist as sub-entities within the hive mind endlessly respawning into new bodies, see Swarmlord). Instead specific strains gain experience, representing the adaptations added to deal with the particular war. So instead of hormagaunt unit A having it's own xp total along with hormagaunt unit B, and so on, the xp goes to 'hormagaunts'. It doesn't matter if they are wiped out or have a different unit number/size every game because it is the fleet putting adaptations on all the hormagaunts it spawns. Disallow the normal crusade upgrades entirely and give Tyranids extra charts with rewards against specific weapons/foes. The sort of thing that would be too niche for matched play but in a crusade league can be tailored to fight the other armies in the league.


Karol wrote:Wouldn't it just mean that instead of having to upgrade one unit of hive guard depending on how it does in the game, all the hive guard units or all the dimas would getting upgraded at the same time, litteraly double or triple dipping on the speed of upgrades?


I still think this is an idea that can be made to work, it just needs be less powerful if it affects more units. Many armies already have secondary resources, like Virulence or Unforgiven Points, nids could have something like "Genetic Adaptation Points" that allows them to mutate a certain types of units in a specific direction - think StarCraft: Heart of the Swarm. It would essentially work just like custom jobs, except it would apply to the whole type of unit.

That said, there have been precedences of tyranids actually gaining experience and the imperium meeting swarms and monsters the have meat before. Tyranids absorb everything back into biomass once their job done, but during an ongoing conflict, there should be different levels of genetic enhancement and experience across the swarm that is currently ravaging the planet.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/06 14:46:54


Post by: Jidmah


Started a new crusade on Friday, a friend and me are playing the Campaign from the Book of Rust. Which I legally acquired from someone who didn't give a gak about that narrative BS and let me cut out the pages from his book.

For those not familiar with it, the campaign is split in three phases with different settings, theaters of war and an epic mission for each. Winning the first two phases and losing the last draws the campaign, winning any other two phases wins you the whole campaign. Not really relevant outside of getting an extra goody for your crusade force. Note that all the characters and units have names, but since many of them are German and flavor getss lost in translation, I'll just call units by their datasheets.

So we played the first legendary mission "Rout on Okharium".

A small force of Dark Angels primaris lead by a master have been marching for weeks across the irradiated wasteland left behind by previous clashes between the defenders of Okharium and local ork warbands. After retrieving a lost artifact from the wastelands, their goal to join the defenders of Linkagar and from there return to the fleet. With all structures and outposts in the region razed by orks, imperial carpet bombing or the heretic's orbital bombardment supplies were running low and even the genetically improved super-soldiers were suffering from fatigue.
Since a few days, a squad of plague marines lead by a plague surgeon from the plague barge Pallidus Ascensorem was relentlessly herding a horde of poxwalkers towards the Dark Angels, denying them any rest or pause. Despite never getting tired, the high radiation levels, cutting winds and flying debris was cutting away at the exposed flesh of the poxwalkers, slowing them down to a crawl.

Deployment
The Dark Angel master decided to cross an abandoned ork outpost, hoping that the piles of scrap and the primitive structures would allow them to ambush their pursuers or at least delay them to give his troops a much needed rest. They fanned out, with the outriders scouting ahead, intercessors investigating a big ork structure which is protected by multiple barricades and the squad of helblasters remaining to guard their leader. Once they would clear the ork outpost, they would be in range for communication with Linkagar and could call in air support for extraction or fire support.

Unbeknownst to them, the Lord of Virulence aboard the Pallidus Ascensorem was already monitoring the scene. Suspecting the plague surgeon of trying to usurp him, he was keeping close tabs on him, ready to strike him down given any reason at all.

Turn 1
Luck is not on the Dark Angel's side. Not only have the death guard advanced and finally caught up to them, but straggling ork lootas open fire on them from hiding spots among the scrap heaps. While their accuracy is as bad as expected from orks, one bullet of the size of a fist smashes into one of the helblaster's helmets and takes him out of action him.
The slow and lumbering poxwalkers have no chance of catching any of the super-soldiers, but the plague marines open fire. The intercessors try to take cover behind walls of scrap metal, but one of their brethren gets hit by a grenade from a blight launcher, dissolving his armor, flesh and bone. The plague surgeon cares for neither friend or foe and makes a bee-line for a scrap heap on top of the ork structure.

The Dark Angels return fire and fell two of the bloated monstrosities that were nothing short of an insult to the emperor himself. With bad sight between all the scrap heaps, the outriders and intercessors fail to take down a poxwalker.

Turn 2
Seeing how the plague surgeon is abandoning his duties and the plague marines are getting gunned down by the false emperor's newest pawns, the Lord of Virulence loses patience and stomps towards the teleportarium, three hulking terminators with scythes following him without making a sound.
Meanwhile on the surface, one of the intercessors is wounded by an ork loota shooting him in the back, the plague marines advance steadily while firing away their guns. The cursed machine spirit of one of the plasma guns turns the biggest one of them, an ugly guy with a malformed head and a drooling maw in his gut, into a huge toxic bonfire, while the other two continue firing unphased, taking out all of the intercessors.
While taking cover from the traitors hiding out in a ruined building, the master's auspex scanner starts beeping. Staring at the display, he sees the warp distorting in the direction of their escape route. He orders his helblasters to open fire at his mark, and despite not seeing any targets yet, the well-trained Dark Angels follow the order. Four nightmarish terminators step out of the warp, just to be hit by plasma projectiles in the very moment they appear. To the masters bitter resentment, despite severely wounding one of the atrocities, none of them fall. He is unable to do anything when a spray of toxic and foul-smelling liquid starts melting the four battle brothers in front of him into a green, bubbling liquid.

Opening fire with his boltstorm gauntlet, the master tries to fall back to a better defensible position. He orders the outriders to establish communications and get that air support, so they kick up their engines and drive out of the outpost. The least he could do is to take as many of these traitors with him before he falls.

Turn 3
The ork loota that had already felled a helblaster earlier shoots the wounded deathshroud terminator and kills it. The few seconds where the Death Guard decide whether to go after the orks or kill the remaining Dark Angel is enough for the Master to escape out of scythe range. The Lord of Virulence still showers him in a deluge of toxins, but his gravis armor took the brunt of the attack. When he uncovers his eyes to assess the damage, the last thing he sees is an orange flash of corrupted plasma before everything goes dark around him.

Turn 5
The plague surgeon lets out a shout of triumph as he sifts through the scrap heap in what must have been a big mek's hoard. A beheaded figure in yellow artificer armor is lying among the scrap, parts of the armor already torn off. But he isn't here for pretty baubles. Using his Narthecium to open up the chest armor, he finds what he was looking for - an Imperial Fist captain's gene seed. Climbing to the highest point of the ork structure, holding his treasure above his head he offers it up to grand father nurgle, in exchange for a boon. Nurgle answers his prayers and the gene seed turns black and green. The hand holding it twists into a claw with long nails that are oozing poison. The plague surgeon remains laughing maniacally atop of the structure while aircrafts of the skitarii approach in the distance.

Aftermath
Due to the infighting between the traitors and the swift response of the forces from the Adeptus Mechanicus, the master of the dark angels and some of his brethren are rescued, where still possible the gene seed secured. For his heroic sacrifice that allowed his outriders to escape, the master was marked for greatness.
Just the relic carried by the master was nowhere to be found - and the librarians are right to fear for the worst, as that relic has now been integrated with the Lord of Virulence's armor, twisted and corrupted by the powers of nurgle.

Having stopped most of the fleeing dark angels by himself, the Lord of Virulence was commended by Lord Thraxoplaxmos himself. The plague surgeon can't help but take his commander's seething anger with a smile. That fool didn't know he was one step closer to daemonhood.

OT:
Spoiler:
With one unit successfully fled and three gunned down, the death guard had won the mission 6:4. The mission itself was surprisingly fair for a historical narrative mission from GW. I really think either force has a real chance at winning this scenario. It also doesn't work too well on 44x30 boards, even if you play 25 or 50 PL, use 44x60
The theatre of war effect "The long March" prevented advances, FNP and made charges fail on a double - this made the mission really awkward, especially since poxwalkers had absolutely no way to catch primaris moving 6". The plague surgeon also almost didn't fulfill his agenda because the captain's corpse was so far from the deployment zone.
Last odd thing is that phase 1 of the campaign has mysterious objective markers as a rule, but the mission for phase 1 doesn't have any objectives

It's also nice that you get additional rewards for completing a phase, so you actually get somewhere even if you end your crusade after just three games, and the campaign has additional rewards for those losing a phase to prevent snow-balling a little. Nothing prevents you from playing multiple games per phase by the way.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/06 16:19:55


Post by: PenitentJake


Sounds like a pretty fun game; I've got the BoR, but my plan was not to fight any of the BoR battles til my army grew a bit- like maybe the last game before we jump to Incursion scale, or based on your advice, more likely the first game after we make the jump.

Board size doesn't normally change between Combat Patrol and Incursion, but since I'll be using 15" tiles rather than GW's boards, I can add 3 tiles and fight on 45" x 45" - do you think that might be sufficient, or do you suggest jumping to a full 45" x 60"

Thanks for the report- it's nice to see a BoR mission play out.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/06 16:32:22


Post by: NinthMusketeer


45x45 should serve you well I think.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/06 18:59:26


Post by: Jidmah


PenitentJake wrote:
Sounds like a pretty fun game; I've got the BoR, but my plan was not to fight any of the BoR battles til my army grew a bit- like maybe the last game before we jump to Incursion scale, or based on your advice, more likely the first game after we make the jump.

Board size doesn't normally change between Combat Patrol and Incursion, but since I'll be using 15" tiles rather than GW's boards, I can add 3 tiles and fight on 45" x 45" - do you think that might be sufficient, or do you suggest jumping to a full 45" x 60"

Thanks for the report- it's nice to see a BoR mission play out.


The problem with the board size comes from how you deploy in that mission - the defenders deploy within 12" of the center line and the attackers 9" from that deployment zone. If you have a table length of 45", you end up with just 2" of deployment zone for the attackers. It wasn't a big problem for me, as I just put all the terminators in reserve, but if you bring any vehicles at all, you're boned. So 45"x60" is probably better.

In general the BoR campaign seems to be handing out quite a bunch of extra goodies compared to regular crusade games, so if you want to kick-start your campaign play it earlier, otherwise playing it just before the jump to incursion is probably the best idea so you don't ruin the vanilla feel of the first few games.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/06 19:38:40


Post by: PenitentJake


Cool. I wonder if the next book in the series will still be in the Oblis Subsector, or if they'll be jumping the action.

It's an interesting dynamic they've set up with the Oblis Invasion Badge, since you could have new units join your campaign in Act 2, and some of them wouldn't have it.

It's been a while since I flipped through the BoR. I haven't been playing, or sadly even painting/ building. The Drukhari dex should have motivated me, but other things just seem to be getting in the way.

I'm counting on the Sisters to pull me back into hobby mode. Some of my forces will be able to fight in the Charadon Crusade, but others will be fighting in my own original campaign.

Eventually, the Crusades will merge, but it's going to take a while.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/07 17:52:17


Post by: Polonius


 NinthMusketeer wrote:
Having tried it, I would say the opposite. Tyranids are really unrewarding in crusade. The mechanics do not reward the play styles Tyranids generally go for, but mostly it is the theme. Having a unit with the 'veterans' reward or a 'digital weapons' relic doesn't work with the narrative of the army. Yeah you can re-fluff it as something else but that makes things a bit hollow. Couple that with a codex that does a piss poor job of representing the narrative of Tyranids as an army already and it is just a recipe for an unsatisfying experience. Because in crusade that narrative feel is a huge part of the picture.


I guess I feel almost the opposite. Tyranids love the psychic buffs, the weapon mods, and get a lot of mileage out of most of the battle honors (at least, to the extent anybody does). I mean, are you really bummed out if your tyranid warriors get +1 move? Reroll ones? Shoot while doing an action?

And the relics are Fantastic for tyranids. It's all invulnerable saves and stuff.



Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/07 19:34:18


Post by: Unit1126PLL


There are no invuln saves available to Monsters as a crusade relic.

I guess if you really want one invuln on a Tyranid Prime you might like the relic.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/07 20:42:20


Post by: Polonius


Oh darn, you are correct. Well, there are still a lot of good buffs available.

But I do understand. I've played Tau and Eldar in my Crusades so far, and I'm really jealous of the dedicated Crusade content.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
 H.B.M.C. wrote:
That's what I'm afraid GW will do with Crusade 'Nids.

I've said it before - may have even been this thread - but I'm just certain that GW's interpretation of Crusade for the Tyranids will be ways of enhancing single creatures, as they "build a legend" or whatever, which is the opposite of what Tyranids should be.

Tyranids shouldn't build characters via veterancy. They're not 'heroes'. They're eminently disposable creatures who will all die once their task is completely anyway. There's no "I'll get you next time, Gadget!" from Hive Tyrants. No "Last time we faced one another I was but the learner, now I am the master!" from Neurothropes. They are all extensions of a singular Hive Mind. Individually they don't matter.

They should overcome obstacles by adaptation and mutation, but I'm sure that GW will just end up giving Tyranid HQs a bunch of titles that grant special rules ("Your Broodlord gained the 'Parasite of Mortex' title, and now causes an extra Mortal Wound on a To Wound roll of 6 in melee!").


Really dumb question: from a mechanics standpoint, what's the difference between Hive Tyrant Jimmy learning to become a "Synapse beacon" with extended range, and Hive Tyrant Jimmy going into the soup, and Hive tyrant Kyle coming out, who mutated to Become a "synapse beacon?" I suppose you'd want different battle scars, perhaps to reflect the biomass cost of recuperating the beast, but this is also a system where "Old one eye" exists.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/07 21:19:06


Post by: PenitentJake


I want to see GW pick up the narrative thread from the Blood of Baal PA where they mentioned the persistent nid planet; they were really, really vague about it, but it seemed like one of the splinters of a particular hive fleet might be starting to experiment with persistent specimens accumulating experience as an adaptation.

I can't wait for Nid and GSC bespoke Crusade content. every dex so far has really used the system to express the "culture" of the faction.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/08 15:47:31


Post by: Unit1126PLL


Why would "persistent specimins accumulating experience" as an adaptation be superior to "the entire race accumulating experience"?

I feel like individual experience is a weakness, not a strength, because a chain is only as strong as its weakest link.

But I digress...


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/08 16:27:57


Post by: Jidmah


Dunno, to me it seems kind of impractical to recall the entire hive-fleet after each battle to improve their claws by a bit and then send them out again.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/08 17:11:29


Post by: Unit1126PLL


 Jidmah wrote:
Dunno, to me it seems kind of impractical to recall the entire hive-fleet after each battle to improve their claws by a bit and then send them out again.


True, though it does make sense that any new bugs will be equipped with those claws and the old bugs with the old claws will be a dying breed who are run down in service and will be expected to be wiped out. Like evolution, the newest generation is the bestest (barring some calamity), but it doesn't mean the current generation just has to be culled.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/08 17:42:47


Post by: Karol


Is there even something like "old" bugs? I know that some genestealer strains are considered unacceptable in the post invasion soup that gets feed to the fleets. But everything else that isn't Pylons or skeleton remains gets melted down and changed in to biomass by the tyranids.

This would make every new spawn of tyranids different from the prior one. As they even adjust them to stuff like climate changed cause by the fleets actions itself etc.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/08 18:06:41


Post by: Unit1126PLL


Yeah, in some ways it would be cool if the Crusade rules for Tyranids made new units better than the ones currently on your roster.

So in essence you'd bring in a fresh unit with the Battle Honor that your first unit "actually" earned, to represent the Hive Mind learning from your first unit's experience and producing the upgrade into the second unit.

So units don't actually gain XP by persisting - instead, any XP they earn makes bringing future units much better.

That'd probably be OP though.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/08 18:25:45


Post by: DarkHound


Okay, but that's not functionally different than each squad just gaining experience. In your suggested system, you can just remove and replace the squad to apply that Battle Honor. Again, the problem with shared upgrades for a unit type is that players may want different combinations of upgrades on the same unit type. It makes for poor play experience and makes for a bunch of complicated balancing problems, plus it doesn't integrate well into the existing systems.

Really, the fact is you don't even need it. You can justify each unit gaining experience in Tyranid fluff easily enough by saying the unit represents a brood or strain. In actual biology, a population has variations so that when evolutionary pressure is applied some variation is already prepared. Adaptation is just that variation out competing other variations under new conditions, thus becoming most common. Likewise with Tyranids, they're not going to throw all their eggs in one basket. They canonically develop all sorts of specialized broods with minor differences (just look at Carnifexes). If one brood of gants develops better accuracy, and another brood in the same Hive fleet grows more powerful symbiote weapons, that's totally within the fluff that the Hive Mind would continue to produce both until one is clearly inefficient.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/08 18:29:21


Post by: Unit1126PLL


Right, though the unit also retaining battle scars doesn't make sense really - unless you just extrapolate from the Old One Eye fluff and just say "all Tyranids can be crippled now".


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/08 18:34:39


Post by: DarkHound


Ah, genetic defects. Rolling for battle scars happens between games, so you don't have to explicitly tie it to those particular models (especially since it only occurs if the entire unit was wiped out). There's always ways to justify the mechanics with fluff.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/08 18:39:24


Post by: Unit1126PLL


 DarkHound wrote:
Ah, genetic defects. Rolling for battle scars happens between games, so you don't have to explicitly tie it to those particular models (especially since it only occurs if the entire unit was wiped out). There's always ways to justify the mechanics with fluff.


Yes, you're right, you could bend the narrative into a pretzel to fit your "narrative" game.

Or the designers could design the narrative game to be narrative, even if it bends them over backwards.

Quite the conundrum which one I'd rather pay for...


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/08 18:55:34


Post by: DarkHound


But your suggestions aren't actually improving play or better representing the fluff. They're just more complicated for the sake of it.

The existing systems work just fine for Tyranids. The best variations in a brood of gants get expressed and become the norm as the pressures of combat cull the worst members (ie the unit adapts as it gains experience). If the best gants in a brood are wiped out, you may be left with weaker or defective gants to replace them (ie battle scars).

There are so many different factions that work in such different ways that you have to make some amount of abstraction for them. The central system needs to be universal so that the game has a common point of competition. You can nitpick, but the system is a consequence of being a shared game.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/08 23:47:14


Post by: PenitentJake


So just got the Admech dex in hand, and their tech system could be modified to work with biomorphs.

In this system, you scavenge "parts" - there are different types of parts; normally you have to determine both the part type AND the specific part from that type- this keeps the OP at bay. You CAN burn RP to choose type (moderate cost) or you can choose specific part (HIGH cost). These increase player Agency, but at a fair opportunity cost.

Parts are acquired via agendas, so the agendas do feel fluffy.

Weapon upgrades can also be given not just to sergeants, like usual, but to whole units (although again, at a pretty high RP cost).

Biomorphs could follow similar mechanics. The only issue is that it would feel "samey" - the agendas would be different, but what you do with biomass points when you get them should feel different too.

There definitely are persistent Nids- Old One Eye, the Red Terror, the Swarmlord... And there is mention of a planet in the Blood of Baal that seems to be experimenting with either persistent Nids or unabsorbed GSC; they kept it vague, but it is definitely there.

Curious about the release schedule again; I had really expected the Ork Beast Snagga box (and just the box) to preorder either this weekend (not happening, as we now know) or the 26th; it certainly will not prorder on the 19th- that will be wall to wall AoS.

Because they split the sisters release, we don't know yet what is coming on the 26th.

The reason this matters is that if all Sisters AND all Orks are out by the end of July, they could do both GK and Ksons in August- after all it is looking like one kit and one dex for each plus the battle box. Charadon Act 2 is also coming.

But IF that's the schedule, it means September is TBA. We're likely to find out about September at the end of July or early August.

Damn I wish they'd just put the information out. We know the next 3 dexes worth of releases and nothing beyond. Nor do we know how long it will take.

I'm totally getting the GK dex. I don't know about the box. That will mean I have Crusade content for all 3 orders militant. Not sure about Ksons; hadn't ever planned on them, but the box set would make it easy. Tough call.

I know I'm not getting Orks. They're cool and everything, but they're not really for me.

With all of that being sort of non-committal, I really want to know what's next.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
Sisters Crusade review on Goons!!!!

Repent!

https://www.goonhammer.com/codex-adepta-sororitas-crusade-review/


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/09 00:59:01


Post by: DarkHound


Goonhammer wrote:Types of Saints, ranked:

3. Potential

2. Living

1. Regular (dead)
Absolutely gut-busting.

Sisters of Battle stuff looks great. The league I'm in is 8 weeks (8 games), but I like the fact that they're willing to put such long reward tracks in. Sainthood should take 10-15 games to achieve (if you manage it at all). Likewise, AdMech tech parts seem hard to acquire and you'll be fortunate to get 1 per game, and you need to somewhat design your army to pursue them; Consequently, fully equipping a Techpriest, let alone upgrading your infantry, is a very long term goal, especially if you're hunting for a particular part. In my 8 weeks, I expect to upgrade my Vanguard's guns and maybe get one worthwhile gadget for my priest (barring some luck).

It'll be interesting to see what they do with the Ork codex. They're my second contemporary army (with about 500 points assembled from my old Assault on Blackreach and teenaged purchases). Maybe the metagame will be assembling a horde, and they'll do something interesting with the "add supply cap" requisition as a way to unlock new abilities representing your growing influence.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/09 01:03:15


Post by: PenitentJake


One word:

WAAAAAAAGGGGGHHHHH!!!!!!


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/09 01:47:12


Post by: Galas


I mean, battle scars make sense in Tyranids but not in the sense of battle scars but genetical defects for a full type of tyranid.

Is actual fluff than when two hive fleets encounter each other they eat themselves and the strongest is the survivor. And it can also happen than a hive fleet takes evolutionary paths that are dead ends or that maybe made sense in the past but are obsolete or outright detrimental.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/09 07:06:14


Post by: Jidmah


Why don't make battle scars sense? Especially the battle scars for monsters seem absolutely fluffy for nids.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/10 05:00:02


Post by: DarkHound


I had my league game tonight. I was planning to try both AdMech agendas to see how they felt in practice. Unfortunately, I was up against a Space Wolf player with no vehicles, and we played Crucial Intelligence which has no objectives. Whomp whomp, I had no way to try the agendas or gain any parts. I don't think that reflects poorly on the agendas, I think I just got unlucky. I'll have a non-league game against my first opponent on Friday, so I'll ask to try them out against him (and I'll loot that damn Redemptor Dreadnought).

I know we talked about experience stacking earlier in the thread, but holy God I accidentally did it. I had a hard time picking agendas for this mission, so I went with Reaper for surety and gambled with Survivor on the Warglaives (he had a lot of Thunderhammers, and literally everything had Stormshields). Survivor is great because the 3 Knights are one unit, so you have to lose two to be at half strength. I figured I could limp away from his Thunderwolves with one and keep some experience. Instead, they ran around the board edge and blasted the cavalry with their lances (thanks to Canticle rerolls), swung back to the other board side and killed his Vanguard Vets, killed his Terminators, then charged up that board edge and killed his warlord. One Knight took 6 damage, the other took 5, and only because he blew 3 CP to interupt fighting, heroic intervene 6", and had a fight last ability. The Knights had the speed and range to dictate engagements, charging what they could kill, and shooting what they couldn't. All things told, they scored 11 experience.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/10 05:23:18


Post by: H.B.M.C.


More pics of that terrain, please!


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/10 05:31:32


Post by: DarkHound


Just for you, I'll take some pictures of the shop's terrain on Friday. They've got tons of space and literally dozens of boards full of terrain to fit different biomes. Friday's game is reserved on a lava world board.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/10 05:38:19


Post by: H.B.M.C.


Cool. Thanks.

I'm always looking to steal ideas... uhh... I mean be inspired by cool terrain ideas.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/12 05:12:14


Post by: DarkHound


Righto, I had my practice game today against my Space Marine opponent from the first game. Generally relevant discussion stuff first: I got hands-on experience with the AdMech agendas. It seems like Tech Scavengers is the reliable, bread and butter way to get parts. That's good fluff, and in practice it's not very hard to achieve the action if you're initially conservative with your infantry. It's even easier since you can take Multi-tasking for RP instead of CP, and the action starts at the end of movement. You basically don't miss a turn, so long as the unit survives. 3 exp is decent too, so you'll probably play this agenda every chance you get. Your opponent just needs to have a vehicle.

Break the Seals is an extremely weird one. You randomly roll to mark an objective after deployment (can't be in your deployment zone), which can be disastrous. It is very likely to take 3 or 4 turns to even get to the objective with a character, let alone do so safely. Three rolls to hit a 5+ is 70% chance, which isn't terrible over the course of an entire league, but painful in an individual game. Scoring 3 or 4 experience isn't bad, but some match-ups may make it impossible to score. The one really important saving grace is that it recovers a weapon part specifically.

Of the three categories, by far the most impactful are weapons, and that's the sole reason Break the Seals is worthwhile. Most guns are workable since they're really just vehicles for the Power Source effect. All the effects are good, like halving movement, splashing mortals to nearby units, and making enemies lose ObSec. In a short league like mine, it's probably worth 5 RP to get the core you want.

My personal white whale is Teleportation Matrix with Vambraces or Digital Cannon. 18 or 24" range assault weapons and if you score any hits then you can teleport to engagement range with the target. Essentially a +30" charge range. My Manipulus is built for melee combat (Anzion's, Masterwork Bionics). I'm seriously tempted to also take the Teleportation Node Battle Honor, which lets me go into reserve (even if engaged) and redeploy in my deployment zone.

Regarding the other archeotech, Force Fields are fairly minor buffs; the only useful ones are 'nearby core units always Hold Steady or Set to Defend', 'nearby core can re-roll one hit or wound', and one Force Field part has an extremely conditional fight last via a Ld contest. Techno-arcana are hyper-specific buffs that apply only the turn you pick a specific Canticle, and mostly only apply to Cult Mechanicus. You'd have to get extremely lucky to get a useful combination.

In summary, it seems like you'll hoard a stockpile of parts first. After you've built a gun or two, most of the parts will be useless and you'll dump them into Consecrated Upgrades. Eventually you may find a good combination of effects for the other slots, but it's not something to plan for.

+++
So about the game, for those interested. We were doing Sweep and Clear with our Crusade armies, but gained no progress in the league. We set aside Agendas to score as a moral victory, just to keep in practice using them. We were playing on the lava field board. He chose to be the attacker and placed his objective in the top left corner, so I placed mine in the middle and bottom left to make one lane of attack, and his last objective went just to the right of the central structure.

The game was a bit of a foregone conclusion, as he didn't have serious anti-tank against my exclusively vehicle army. I reserved the Vanguard and hid the Rangers. He alpha-struck hard and rolled well, but didn't finish any vehicles off. The Armigers were regenerating 2 wounds per turn, and the Manipulus got to work on the tanks; I think I recovered ~20 wounds total. The Knights killed his right side push and captured that objective, while the tanks shot him off the left middle one. At the bottom of turn 1, it was clear he wouldn't get control of the objectives back. Still, good practice to play it out and test your limits; he managed to kill 2 Knights, which is more than the better equipped Space Wolves player.

The rest of the shop's boards, for HBMC's benefit. I'd've taken more pictures, but I don't want to spam the page.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/12 06:01:40


Post by: H.B.M.C.


 DarkHound wrote:
The rest of the shop's boards, for HBMC's benefit. I'd've taken more pictures, but I don't want to spam the page.
You can just link to them, or to your gallery. Don't need to post them all.

Those are some very nice looking tables. Where is that Tau stuff from?


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/12 17:15:54


Post by: NinthMusketeer


Everything is either GW plastic or 3d printed (filament). The latter, in the case of the Tau terrain.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/13 23:55:28


Post by: DarkHound


Yup, my local shop has a pretty healthy business producing and selling 3D sculpts, as well as selling use of their printer for custom orders.

I did just realize I made a pretty big mistake: vehicle squadrons are treated as separate units for the Order of Battle. They gain experience and upgrades separately, take agendas separate, and so forth. So I didn't actually gain 11 experience on half my army in one match. That's good, and I'm glad I caught it before it affected an actual league game. Plus it means I can tailor the upgrades to match each Knight's fluff.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/14 13:33:41


Post by: PenitentJake


So I had a weird idea. One of the recent AoS 3.0 articles talked about their equivalent of Crusade, and it looks like holding and capturing territory is native to all factions- it's a core Path to Glory mechanic.

Now obviously, no one has seen the Crusade content for Chaos Daemons yet... But since that army can play in both games, and time and space are pretty meaningless concepts for Daemonic armies...

What if the same army shifts back and forth?

I'm dealing with an ultra-fluffy, open-ended story-based Campaign, so any buffs are essentially story hooks rather than ways to steamroll your opponents.

But I like the idea of territories- it's why DE is still my favourite Crusading dex- despite being able to build glorious machines or pursuing the path of sainthood.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/14 15:22:43


Post by: Inquisitor Lord Katherine


 DarkHound wrote:
Yup, my local shop has a pretty healthy business producing and selling 3D sculpts, as well as selling use of their printer for custom orders.

I did just realize I made a pretty big mistake: vehicle squadrons are treated as separate units for the Order of Battle. They gain experience and upgrades separately, take agendas separate, and so forth. So I didn't actually gain 11 experience on half my army in one match. That's good, and I'm glad I caught it before it affected an actual league game. Plus it means I can tailor the upgrades to match each Knight's fluff.


Is your local shop At Ease Games in Miramar? That looks just like it from the pictures!


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/14 16:00:05


Post by: DarkHound


Ding ding ding, we have a winner! Are you a local?


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/06/16 23:47:06


Post by: Inquisitor Lord Katherine


 DarkHound wrote:
Ding ding ding, we have a winner! Are you a local?


San Diego is my hometown, and At Ease was my local store.


Crusade experience wanted! @ 2021/07/04 08:15:45


Post by: DarkHound


Hey again, I started this thread asking for experience and now I've got some to share. We've got 3 weeks left in the league and the staff are starting to think about the next one. I'm starting a new faction from scratch, so I hope thinking out loud about my experience and planning a new faction can help others prepare their own. I've been playing Knights and AdMech, and I'm preparing ~50PL of Iyanden Eldar.

So far in the league I've been fortunate and have gone undefeated; I've been averaging 6 exp gained from 2 agendas and about 7 kills. That bears out what we discussed earlier, where a couple units gain about 6-8 experience each game. I've seen the opposite, where players can't get a foothold in the match, fail to complete agendas, then lose more experience than they gained due to failed out of action tests. That seems to happen when players take agendas reacting to their opponent, rather than taking agendas they built their army to score (just like secondaries in regular play, duh). The lesson is to figure out which units you want to upgrade first, then figure out which agendas they can score, then pick the best of those for the match at hand.

In actually spending that experience, I was surprised how infrequently I used the AdMech's crusade rules. The core book upgrades are very strong, and the faction specific rules seem to be either niche or gated. After 5 games, I've finally built my first relic and I'm no where near either a second or a squad-wide weapon upgrade. Factions without extra rules aren't going to feel a difference for 6-10 games.

I'll give a practical of how I'm planning my Eldar. Several important units, like the Wraithblades or Farseer, don't actually benefit from much from Battle Honors so I don't have to worry about their experience. They'll get to 6 exp for the one useful upgrade through kills and participation (and maybe a timely Mark). The unit of Dire Avengers starts as mandatory chaff but has a lot of room to grow. Fleet, Grizzled, and Battle Tested all make them great at getting to objectives and completing actions (and there are a lot of missions with actions). I'd probably Mark them to get Battle Tested early and then start completing Shadow Operations agendas. Similarly, the Dark Reapers could use almost every Battle Trait and want plenty of Exarch gun upgrades; they'll be a good target for Survivor and Marks in most games.