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Jancoran wrote:While you are...intintionally...ignoring the benefit

I'm not trying to, maybe I just missed it? I really don't see where a randomly determined short game is somehow more or less fair to both players than a randomly determined long game.

Jancoran wrote:What say you to 6 rounds + Random game length?

I'm certainly open to trying it but long games tend to work out for me, a lot of people prefer a 5-7 turn clock instead of a 6-7 or 6-8 clock because it becomes less of an objectives game and more of a table your opponent game the longer it goes on.

ZebioLizard2 wrote:

rigeld2 wrote:

ZebioLizard2 wrote:

Orks, Tyranids, Dark Eldar, Blood Angels or even Grey Knights, which do not have a bunch of units that can sit back and take potshots across the board, have about no chance to win by collecting mission points.

Tyranids: Warriors, termagaunts

I wasn't aware 18" (at best) was "across the board". Warriors can get a single 36" range gun - but that hardly matches C:SM or many of the other gunline type armies that can just sit on one objective and blow me off the others.

Than be aggressive in taking the objectives, I know which mission you spoke of before, the Chaos Pillage mission now that I looked it up from my editions. Be aggressive, by the rules you still collect points even in combat so long as you have something touching it. Pull them off, assault them and force them off while keeping a token task force on your own.

You have one of those units, true. The armies I mentioned before can easily leave three or more of those units sitting in the backfield with their thumbs up their backside without losing anything. If a GK leaves a squad of terminators and a squad of purifiers in his deployment zone and does nothing but shoot with them, he is not going to kill anything. Same for orks fielding three units of gretchin (maybe doable in a BW list, impossible in all others). As far as I know BA don't use tac squads and assault squads and outside of razorspam, assault squads are required elsewhere.

Than get up and be aggressive, the battle mission Pillage allows you to take points even if you are in combat and next to it with your own.

Have you played it? That would show you the exact flaw I tried to point out. As orks, I have no choice but to be aggressive, so I pretty much do what I do in all objective games, capture the ones the opponent is sitting on. As aggressive as possible means that I hit the enemy front lines by turn 2 (battlewagons) or turn 3 (footslogging) At that time, an opponent who can sit on objectives already has ramped upt 6-9 points (even more if facing fast transports or infiltrators). It will take another turn or so to completely clear the enemies off the objectives, and by that time have no way of catching up with the lead they have taken. Assuming that you are able to clear them out at all, an IG castle with a powerblob around it can easily sit on three objectives and is really hard to move out of the way.

Any games featuring accured points for objectives really needs to have an odd number of objectives, with the 'odd' objective being in the centre of the table. Anyone who simply castles up is going to lose, or at best claim a draw.

Having troops clock points for sitting on objectives each turn completely invalidates assaulty/mobile codices that rely on their troops to fight. E.g. BA, Chaos, Orks, DE.

The reason objectives don't count until the end of the game at the moment is because it allows assaulty armies with troops to do their thing before worrying about objectives.

Perhaps this could work simply by having two objective missions. One where you gain points for sitting on objectives and one where you grab them last turn. To give both types of armies a chance. Troop heavy assaulting armies might find the accumulation missions difficult but it wouldn't be all the time.


An alternative would be to have a mission with 5 objectives and you accumulate a point each turn that you hold more objectives that your opponent. It would mean that a troop heavy assault army could force his shooty-campy opponent to leave his castle and come get him, by temporarily holding two objectives in his backfield to counteract those in his opponent's backfield.

lunarman wrote:An alternative would be to have a mission with 5 objectives and you accumulate a point each turn that you hold more objectives that your opponent. It would mean that a troop heavy assault army could force his shooty-campy opponent to leave his castle and come get him, by temporarily holding two objectives in his backfield to counteract those in his opponent's backfield.

Thats the same net result as either having a single objective, or having an odd number with the 'odd' objective being in the centre. Basically, both teams will accrue the same number of points until one player grabs that 'odd' objective. Players can castle up and hope for a draw, but no one gets to the top tables by playing for draws.

Jancoran - no, there is no real benefit.

Also 6+random turn 7 just means you have made last turn objective grabbing easier than usual - not the complete g'tee you made it with your initial suggestion, but still not exactly a great improvement to proving the "elite"-ness of a skimmer heavy player.

It is entirely 100% unuterrably and incontrovertably fair that table 1 finishes on turn 5 when table 2 finishes on turn 6. Fact. Your premise is still flawed, and instead of complaining that people are only looking at the negatives maybe understand what they are saying, rather than bullishly ignoring it.

I am also a TO, albeit a minor one (max 54 players, all our hall comfortably holds), so I AM looking at this like a TO - balancing missions is hard, what you are proposing would entirely feth the already limited balance this game has, skewing it even more into a game of "whoever wins the dice roll for deployment wins" than this game already can be, with certain match ups.

GW got random game lenth *right*, turn 5 - 7 is exactly the right number of turns, as it covers the long and short games that different armies can play to very well.

Can't wait to see how much 6th Ed rocks some peoples world. Change, or even the mention of it, makes for interesting responses.

Thank you to all who contributed to the convo in the spirit it was meant to be discussed. It's been enlightening and I think I have seen the gamit of responses I'm going to. Random game length is obviously popular and feelings run strong on it so that tells me what I need to know.

Oh for...

This isnt a fear of change, and you characterising it as such as a way to dismiss peoples valid, sound reasoning as to why the removal of random game length would utterly destroy the limited balance this game has, is dishonest and, quite frankly rude.

Random game length isnt just "popular", as you have summarised it - it is *essential* to how an objectives based IGOUGO mission works. The fact you dont seem to understand this worries me, as you profess to be a TO making up missions - and if you cannot understand such a basic concept i doubt your missions will end up balanced.

Poor show.

Your hyperbole aside (and thats what that was) I'm satisfied there wont be any more responses that will add to the discussion. What's been said is adequate.

I "understand" why you think its essential. Just spent 5 pages listening to it. I already knew most of what would be said. What I really cared about knowing was how strong the current was and how willing to try something different. Now I know. Mission accomplished.

Poor show to you sir. Do not ascribe motivations to a person you dont know and dont expand the import of this forum thread beyond what it actually means: very little other than that it got talked about. Lol.

I am really awed by how much you are twisting your own argumentation just appear right, dodging counter-arguments, choking any string of argumentation that doesn't run in your favor and questioning the motivation of everyone who disagrees with you.

Say, did you recently lose an election and move to wargaming instead of politics?

Jidmah wrote:I am really awed by how much you are twisting your own argumentation just appear right, dodging counter-arguments, choking any string of argumentation that doesn't run in your favor and questioning the motivation of everyone who disagrees with you.

Say, did you recently lose an election and move to wargaming instead of politics?

He's been pretty polite and well mannered the whole time. Lay off a little, huh?

Jancoran wrote:Your hyperbole aside (and thats what that was) I'm satisfied there wont be any more responses that will add to the discussion. What's been said is adequate.

Sigh. Gotta love how you twist any rational argument around so you still appear "right". You're not. You're wrong. You have been in pretty much every post.

Jancoran wrote:I "understand" why you think its essential. Just spent 5 pages listening to it.

You have shown zero evidence that you have listened to anything, given you have come to the conclusion that people fear change and this is why they want to keep random game length. It isnt the reason. The reasons, of which there are many, have been explained to you in a number of ways, yet you refuse to accept them and instead ascribe a different rationale to them.

Very, very poor show.

Jancoran wrote: I already knew most of what would be said. What I really cared about knowing was how strong the current was and how willing to try something different. Now I know. Mission accomplished.

And, yet again, you ascribe fear of change to well founded, rational and 100% correct arguments to the contrary.

Poor show.

Jancoran wrote:Poor show to you sir. Do not ascribe motivations to a person you dont know and dont expand the import of this forum thread beyond what it actually means: very little other than that it got talked about. Lol.

"LOL" back. You clearly didnt want to hear the truth, so have ascribed negative connotations to those posting in the contrary to your ill founded, ill thought out ideas.

Perhaps if you reread what *I* wrote again... You'd see that I was quite reasonable. I agreed that the majority want to keep random game lengths. So I dont know WHAT you're actually talking about. Not only did I listen but I moved on from the original question and conceded the point. So should you. Seriously.

You're too busy being righteously indignant, drawing lines in sand and abusing the English language to notice the conversation evolved. And that's fine. I don't need you to notice. I certainly dont need you to tell me what the "truth" is that I "don't want to hear". I just needed your opinion and I got it.

So moving on.

Just let the thread die, the points and counter points that make up the body of the thread still stand by themselves regardless of who gets the snarky last post. Anyone who searches for this topic in the future can read the relevant ideas and opinions and form their own conclusions, a string of personal attacks tacked on the end just muddy the relevant information. There doesn't need to be a winner or loser here.


PS: I'm totally the winner here

Jancoran wrote:Perhaps if you reread what *I* wrote again... You'd see that I was quite reasonable. I agreed that the majority want to keep random game lengths. So I dont know WHAT you're actually talking about. Not only did I listen but I moved on from the original question and conceded the point. So should you. Seriously.

I read what you wrote, which is the conclusion is that people are afraid of change.

Which is wrong.

Meaning you didnt listen. In fact you did the opposite of listening - you made something up, were corrected on it, ignored it and continued to parrot your made up conclusion, and so on.

Random game length means the game is based more on luck than skill.

You might say that the rest of the combat in the game is decided by luck. This is true but you roll so many dice that the combat results average out and you can easily account for your loses and victory's and adapt your battle plan accordingly. you cant do that with single turn roll.

Thats false, it shows which player is able to adapt to a changing tactical situation instead of schenanagins with trying to go second and zip onto the objectives last round.

If I can't deal with random game length, I'm a bad player. Randomness allows players to demonstrate their flexability.

I've always also been of the opinion that while in general dice are ok, the ending of a game time is simply too big a factor to be left up to a single dice roll at the end. However the fact remains that with the current rules last second rushes would get absolutely ridiculous.

That is why I think the current system for ending the game should be replaced entirely and it should become a system in which after turn 3 or turn 4 are over then certain objectives depending on the game type need to be met, and when they are that team wins.

Like Flames of War, basically?

If that was used there would need to be a similer mechanic to FoW where you can break your opponent's army and make them run away. Otherwise it could just be a bloody stalemate and games would take even longer.

FoW can last for 10+ turns, but each turn can be fairly quick. A turn of 40k can take upwards of 15 minutes.

Grey Templar wrote:Thats false, it shows which player is able to adapt to a changing tactical situation instead of schenanagins with trying to go second and zip onto the objectives last round....

I have to agree with this point here. I have played games that are timed, 60 minutes 45 minutes, and the like with no set amount of rounds and watch players activate their characters in minimal controlled ways with the intent of milking the clock so that when the word goes out for last 2 minutes or something they do a massive bum rash attack in attempt to win the game on points at time because they have been cheesy in their play.

However when you don't know for sure if the game is about to end you have to change your style from a turtling style to an aggressive style. So I like the randomness because if you turtle until turn five and then do a full court press with your army only to realize their is a turn six and your army is just all out there....it shows that it still is not about 1 single roll of the dice but your play style has put so much emphasis on that 1 roll.

I play Star Wars Miniatures and was very active in that community and there was a point where the tourny rules had to change because of a power combo that came into being, Black and Blue and Kota Bomb/Han Cannon. Those two combos could essentially destroy a squad/army in one big display of power. Both relayed on a dice role to pull it off (initiative), and both squads had a gimmick that helped even more in that regard (master tactition/Recon). But basically you would use the end of one turn to position your pieces, do some damage to soften up your opponent and then, win initiative and annihilate them. Even if you don't table them you have basically decimated the heart of their squad. So the rules had to change to prevent these combos from taking over the game.

With the random role for turn 6 and 7 it helps assure fair, even, and optimal play for both players. Not a one sided end of game slaughter. (If such does happen its based on combinations of multiple die roles, player skill and tactics and war gear.)

Exactly. It's a great balance between forcing action at the end, while forcing players to balance how "all in" they push against the possibility that the game will continue and they will be too exposed. You need to set up the position in the early turns so that you can make your play for the win on 5 without leaving yourself open to be crushed if it goes on.

Mannahnin wrote:Exactly. It's a great balance between forcing action at the end, while forcing players to balance how "all in" they push against the possibility that the game will continue and they will be too exposed. You need to set up the position in the early turns so that you can make your play for the win on 5 without leaving yourself open to be crushed if it goes on.

That's pretty much my thinking on it.

You shouldn't be able to count on winning the game on a technicality either,

i like the idea of a tourny game lasting a set length. But i think that the games should get longer as the tourney progresses. So the first game is five round, second game is six round and so on.

this would make it more challenging as the tourney progressed.

but i see where a situation like that would tick people of i mean who wants to loose because of a dice role

You don't lose because the game ends.

You lose because you played worse than the other player up till the point where the game ended.

Jidmah wrote:You don't lose because the game ends.

You lose because you played worse than the other player up till the point where the game ended.

This.

If the games are a set turn length, the game will turn into "hunt the fast skimmer".

I don't like anything that allows a weaker, defeated army to draw/win due entirely to a single dice roll.

It's not due to a single dice roll. It's due to playing to the objectives and not taking the chance that the game will continue.

Joey wrote:I don't like anything that allows a weaker, defeated army to draw/win due entirely to a single dice roll.

This. It does take skill to position and prepare yourself for the next turn and you need to assume there will be a 6th turn.

But that doesn't stop weaker army's, or army's that have already lost the game if it goes for another turn, rushing on turn five and having a 1/3 chance of winning.


Automatically Appended Next Post:
And if thats what FOW play's like then i am even more interested in it. That sounds like a good way to run objective based games

Joey wrote:I don't like anything that allows a weaker, defeated army to draw/win due entirely to a single dice roll.

You lose the game when the roll does not turn in your favor, you didn't defeat the enemy. Blowing 2/3 of the enemy army off the table only counts as defeating during Annihilation.

Whenever a single roll (game ends, moral check for that most important unit, psychic test for the power you really need, penetration roll against the vehicle which really has to die) makes you lose the game, it is your fault for maneuvering the game into a state where a single roll makes you lose. Not the dice's fault.