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Im one of thouse liking almost all rumored 5th Ed changes and hoping for a good implementation. The single thing that irks me is Kill points or whatever its called, where one unit grants 3 points while another grants 1(!).

I mean double victory points for the opponents commander as a secondary objective is nice, but this too much. I fear it leads to extremely onedimensional army lists.

it's probably going to be the escalation of 5th ed.

i can't count the number of times i've read the words "that's an effective army as long as you don't roll escalation" in armylist threads.

i think this is going to be the same which probably isn't a good thing.

How do you think will these one-dimensional army lists look like?

Greets
Schepp himself

I'd be willing to partially agree with you. But i'd have to partially disagree too.

It's a bit more of a radical change than we are all expecting. Some armies seem very comfortable with this change, while others just don't seem to interface with that rule at all.

Vanilla space marine can just take it in stride. Troops are worth 1 and they are scoring, fine. We'll take some of those. Their speedier and killier options are worth 2 a piece. Fair enough, for the extra versatility, they have to pay the price. Their high quality independent characters carry the steep price tag of 3kp. Find a resilient unit tuck him in and don't worry too much about losing the points.

Imperial guard? Every optional unit in the HQ platoon is worth 3 points? So 3 points for my sentinel? 3 points for my 6 man heavy weapons team, 3 points for my demo team? 3 points for the command squad and 3 points for the chimera they rode in on too? Certain choices in the imperial guard codex are just completely ruined by this new rule.

I don't mind hard, killy ICs to cough up "bonus" kp. But mandatory units of wimps like command squads will now just be unarmed permanently screened liabilities until IG gets a new book.

However, I did like the system as it was implemented in Warmahcine. in warmachine however they were more careful about setting the VP value. Game developers could make something points-expensive, but VP cheap. Or something points-cheap but VP expensive. With a ridiculous arbitrary implementation, you have a Hive tyrant with 3 tyrant guard worth the same KP as a Junior Officer and 4 naked guardsmen.

I am happy as a clam for a KP system. One with less arbitrary points settings would be a new tool to balance units, a tool that can be used in conjunction with the FOC and with points costs.

I'm sure after all armies are up to 5th edition codecies it'll all be fine. I'm sure my great-grandchildren will love that.

Shep wrote:
I'm sure after all armies are up to 5th edition codecies it'll all be fine. I'm sure my great-grandchildren will love that.

that really sums up the problem in a nut shell. at no point in time are all the different army books in sync with the rules. and they never will be.

It'll probably discourage people from taking things like Land Speeders as three units of one, rather than as a single squadron. Likely see less suicidal Autarchs and Tau Commanders going solo tank hunting and the like, given they'd be worth so many points.

It sucks rocks because I can field an effective, ork, sisters, necron army that can give up a total of 7 kill points. Other armies will be lucky to field a minimum of 12 points and still be effective. Its just too damn one sided and not balanced at all across all the codexs.

Excellent point, Jayden.

My old 120 Sisters of Battle army (from the CA book, not the crap that Hoare made) would be a real pita to deal with if I converted every model to bolter fun.

Sad thing is, that worthless special character would actually be good. So long as she kept coming back, no KP's.

Ah, KP denial armies. I'm so not looking forward to it.

i doubt that KP denial will be a good thing to build around. it's only in play one out of three games. you'll need to plan for it, but building a list that can win the other two missions seems slightly more important.

You can deny KPs and build for the other missions.

I like to call it "GW says use troops and this time they mean it" missions.

I think if it's used without the force org chart that currentl exists it could be interesting.

OU have the choice of either going for powerfull units which can't hold objectives and if killed will give away lots of points, or go for grunts who can claim objectives and don't give man away.

For instance i played a couple of games over this last week using m new list of bezerkers, noise marines and CSM's in rhino's with a pair of oblits a vindicator and a DP + raptors. So that gives me 3 scoring units, and i give away 12ish points iirc.

one game was against BA's 2 10 man assault squads, 1 5 man vet squads, some DC, a drea, 2 speeders dante + lemartes. So he's onl got 2 scoring and gives awa about 15-18! see what happens if ou load up on characters and single speeders!

The other game was against eldar - 3 tricked out falcons, 2 dA squads some harlis and 2vipers + farseer. Now that has 2 objective grabbers, but gives up again 15-18.

ou can pla powerfull lists, but ou'll give awa a lot it seems!

Kill points are part of a good idea. Simply the victory conditions so that you dont have to toal up unit values.

However its simplified by a good deal of hand waving by GW. with a tweak here and there it could be a good rule, but it has to run the gauntlet of illiterate monkeys and retards that infest the design studio.

I think the Force Org chart is a much worse idea then KP's, and the Force Org has been around for a while now!

KPs is a bad idea for a number of reasons, first of which is the differences between the utilities troops can get, for example, the newer marine dex's (Blood Angels, Dark Angels) offer the combat squads system, and presumably vanilla marines will end up with it too, With it, marines can pay for a single troops choice of 10 marines, 5 of which are with a heavy weapon and are 4 ablative wounds for it, The other 5 are a sergeant and a special weapon soldier who are coming forward to put all their wargear to good use. No points for eliminating the 5 guys who are standing in my face blasting me with rapid fire bolters and plasma and threatening with a powerfist unless I can also kill the 5 guys in heavy cover somewhere.

The alternative to this is that each combat unit counts as it's own unit so I get twice as many killpoints for the squad, Which also begs the question, do we stop using transports because they are also a free KP, Drop a dreadnaught in a Drop Pod and it's 2 free Kill Points for your open topped, AR 12, immobile transport.

Then on the flip side, there's the armies that can deny points while still being valid, once again I tend to look to marines, The broad range of weapon options on each troop choice means they can massively deny KP without having to sacrifice too much potential.

Then there's things like Gaunts who, taking spinegaunts as an example, can get a full squad of 32 on the board for a mere 160 points. These are of equal value under Kill points to the 20 man Chaos Space marine squad which is footslogging across the board for 300 points without any upgrades.

There's potential, but the way it's looking at the moment, it's a laughable system.

The answer here is more a methodology issue--

GW needs to start releasing codexes online, for free or next to nothing (5.00), and playtesting them in the community, and releasing them on a frequent basis.

There is absolutely no excuse for every single codex not getting an update the moment a new edition comes out. Seriously. That's the kind of crap we as players/customers should not be standing for.

If you release a new edition, release a set of errata for every army in the edition and do it within a month or two of a new edition coming out.

Maaaan does it piss me off when I think about it. such lazy crap. It also forces them to balance the new edition in light of old army lists, which is CRAP!

Having played in PP tournaments where the VP system is near identicle to the KP system, I have to say I hate the idea. IMHO it is the worse thing about PP tournaments and leads to some really lame ass games. Infact i think they dropped winning by VPs in the more recent steamroller rules (could be wrong though).

Longshot wrote:GW needs to start releasing codexes online, for free or next to nothing (5.00), and playtesting them in the community, and releasing them on a frequent basis.

Didn't they do this for Warhammer Fantasy Battles, thousands of years ago?

Ihavenoavatar wrote:

Longshot wrote:GW needs to start releasing codexes online, for free or next to nothing (5.00), and playtesting them in the community, and releasing them on a frequent basis.

Didn't they do this for Warhammer Fantasy Battles, thousands of years ago?

Ravening hordes?

All in all, I like the idea. I think you should get a bonuse for taking out the enemy HQ and the elite / heavy units over killing the troops. Victory points did a bit of this since Hq/elite/heavy units tended to be more expensive but now I think that the extra weight is a good thing. On the flip side, some of the ramifications of it really suck. As many have already stated, IG is totaly screwed. They can't take tough units and they can only get certain things in big blocks from HQ slots so they have an insane amount of kill points on the table.

What really needs to happen is a ravening hordes style multi codex to bring everyone up to date with the new rules or maybe just a chapter approved book to update some of the codexes that are really old and don't work with the new system. One way or another, they really need something to make a lot of the old armies playable again since the new rules really throw a monkey wrench into a lot of them.

I play a lot of WM/Hordes, and it's just like their VP system. Like all systems, it has its pros and cons. Yes, there will be KP denial armies, but I don't think they'll work as well as VP denial in WM.

I like that they are separating the points value from the kill points. I think they needed to do that a long time ago. Rhinos shouldn't have been 35/50 points for every army - they gave different armies more or less. Great for armies that want to close, not as valuable to armies that want to hangback. So, for say Space Wolves, maybe the rhino is more points since it gives them more utility (they need to get closer) than say vanilla SM who can sit back and let you come to them. But, the rhino is just as easy to kill for both armies, so it's fair to give it the same VP/KP (which, yes, I realize a rhino doesn't have any, but this is just an example).

People will always figure out a way to abuse/work around any scoring system.

My current Hybrid Tau list, which I never got cries of cheese on, comes in at 30 kill points.

How can you even compete with a list that only brings 10 or so kill points to the table.

All they gotta do is wipe out a few crisis suits, drop a hammerhead and pirahna and already its probably impossible for me to get a win.

Keep in mind Kill Points are only used if you draw on mission objectives.

Keep in mind Kill Points are only used if you draw on mission objectives.

That's Victory Points, Kill Points are the mission objective for Total Annihilation (read: one third of the games you will play)

So, I'm thinking of starting a deathwing army...

there also things we don't know yet. for instance if a force org slot includes multiple units that deploy separately the opponent may get points for each unit or they may only score points once by killing all of them. the former would make guard unplayable, the latter would make them unbeatable.

i really hope it's the former though. hopefully guard will get a dex soon after dark eldar. the idea of hiding one unit out of a slot full to deny KP sounds like it would make for really irritating games.

This rule also really punishes stealthy armies. JSJ units, infiltrators, etc. will all be hurt by large squad sizes, or give up tons of Kill Points if you go with (tactically) optimal smaller squads. I'm wondering if Planetstrike might incorporate something to counter this condition.

Either way, my 3-elf jetbike squads are going to get rolled into 6-elf squads. I'm not happy about that, as splitting fire and casualties was really nice.

You just have to keep one of them alive to count as scoring or giving away killpoints. And if you have enough other scoring units, you don't have to count on some jetbikes to claim the objective. Killpoints are another topic, but if they are so much more effective in two units of three, I would still go by that unit number.

Greets
Schepp himself

Ideally GW should have specific rules for each army, although I know that is rather unrealistic to expect. I think the real winners of the current kill point rules would be the necrons. around 70 warriors + 1 lord with rez orb and phylactry = 10 kill points. With that many warriors and the gauss rules of being able to hurt anything on a 6 an all warrior necron army could get pretty stupid. Add in run rules for a side order of ridiculous. These rules are not final though so nobody should get up-in-arms over any of this until we see something on paper, preferably signed in blood.

Har, Har!
Think of 150 best-equipped Ork-Boys and a biker-boss in your points-sector.
--->8 KP!

FuzzyOrb wrote:Har, Har!
Think of 150 best-equipped Ork-Boys and a biker-boss in your points-sector.
--->8 KP!

Totally off-topic but the 6 big units of boys and a biker boss have some SERIOUS blind spots in 5th edition. 3 leman russes screened by a medium-sized fearless conscript unit seem like a pretty unfavorable matchup. 3 monoliths corner to corner in front of some hiding warriors, with 10 man scarab units lining the sides might not be that fun either. I'm sure there are a ton more armor 14 template based lists that would encourage an ork player to spend more points on "elite" or "support".

But i cannot deny that the current implementation of kill points is totally sloppy and not really all that balanced and usable in its current form.

the problem with amalgamating several smaller units into one larger one is that you loose scoring units. you have to keep as many troops as possible for the other 2/3s of the missions. it will lead to the end of the days of individual obliterators or land speeders though.