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Especially with Apocalypse games being decided based on an objective system like that of Epic: Armageddon it appears that the rumoured 5th edition of Warhammer 40k might change. Victory point games seem to devolve into who can kill each other's stuff the fastest even when victory points are awarded for capturing objectives; after all the easiest way to capture an objective is to kill whatever might defend it!

What do you folks think about the pros and cons of victory points and objectives?

Multiple objectives are the way to go.

- G

Objectives do tend to favour highly mobile armies - e.g. Mech Eldar.

I think they do provide another aspect to the game, but being able to decimate the opposing army should matter for something, and all the current Codexes would need to be scrapped as objective based missions reflect a different set of unit considerations than VP missions.

I think both styles of VP should be reflected - some battles are about objectives at almost any cost e.g. d-day, others about annihilation (or survival) e.g. dunkirk.

I'd also like to see scenarios with different VP calculation for each player, and on top of that the other player not knowing what the emphasis is.

e.g. player 1 gets 2 * VP for objectives but none for killing, but at the same time player 2 gets normal VP for objectives and killing. Both have the same potential where objectives VP = force size.

Difference in how you get your VPs can reflect different objectives for 2 forces - e.g Verdun was all about the location for the french, a symbolic fight for which any casualities were bearable, but for the germans it was largely about bleeding the french dry. French would be 2* VP for objectives 0 for casaulties, germans would be 2* VPs for casualties 0 for objectives.

A scenario could set out location objectives, but then each player draws a chit which indicates the multiplier for Objectives VP and for Casualty VPs. He keeps it secret until counting time. Though it may become obvious as the game wears on.

VPs lead to "VP-denial" armies, which are very boring to play against. Multiple objectives are much better IMO.

There was a neat set of missions called Rules of Engagement that used 2 objectives and individually rolled missions. Unfortunately the missions weren't really balanced. But with a little work, they could form the basis of a better system.

Multiple objective based missions are almost essential to keep the game fluid and interesting. Let's face it, when two static shooting armies both castle up and start trading shots, nobody wins.

What I'd like are objective based missions where only the objectives count for VP purposes and the objectives simply are as far away or difficult to reach as possible for each player, so that annihilation in a turn limited game is not essentially an auto-win.

I have nothing against rewarding people for blowing out their opponents, but that sort of game is often boring or just unpleasant for one or both players involved. I'd rather be able to win a game through careful movement and target selection/resource management than simply decide it based on who brought more guns and rending weapons to the party, as those builds are fairly stale.

Not saying that a player doesn't face tactical decisions in game, but adding another dimension to victory conditions that aren't easily served by destroying everything on the board would certainly make a game that's light on decision making after deployment into something more interesting.

So how would guard actually win a game in that scenario?

"I'd rather be able to win a game through careful movement and target selection/resource management than simply decide it based on who brought more guns and rending weapons to the party, as those builds are fairly stale. "


I don't think that's what it would be.

Instead of winning the game by bringing more guns, you win the game by bringing more skimmers.

40K tables are generally 4x4 or 6x4, skimmers move 24"+ (with upgrades). Basically if they're anywhere that's not an extreme corner they can park on any objective on the last turn of the game.

Objectives in this scenario are completely arbitrary.

At the very least, objectives should score points on the basis of "500 points each turn you hold the objective" rather than an all or nothing land grab on the last turn of the game.

Drop troops, Chimeras, Rough Riders? As was said before, the Codices and core rules aren't exactly optimised with this sort of thinking, but come on. The tables aren't that big.

I'm really hoping 40k5 moves away from VPs to Mission Objectives.

The whole chase for VPs and VP denial tactics simply isn't fun. It's boring and lacks imagination. It's Industrial Age warfare, and distorts the game by placing an exceptionally high premium on getting the first turn and really good terrain to shoot out of.

If playing for multiple objectives, that's far more interesting. Even with the presence of Fast Skimmers. But even the slowest army (Guard) can get a Tank from their board edge to anywhere on the table over 6 turns.

Strangelooper wrote:VPs lead to "VP-denial" armies, which are very boring to play against.

Thats a slight distortion. If half of all VPs always includes unit killing then that leads to units that are 'casualty denial'. Objective only games are essentially still VPs - 1 VP per objective.

You can have caualties and objectives, but by switching the weighting and not knowing what the other guys weigthings are at the start you can't simply bring the skimmer army of denial. If your weighting is 2*casualties and 0 objectives then you'd better have lots of fire power on those skimmers, if the other guy has 2*objectives then he doesn't really care whether he can kill you or not, as long as he can grab objectives.

This is why I liked that 'Rules of Engagement' feature they did in WD a while back.

In that, each player gets two objective markers. One is placed in their DZ, the other in the opponent's DZ. You would roll to find out what your mission would be, and it could be anything like:

1. Capture both enemy objectives.
2. Stop the enemy from capturing yours.
3. Hold one of theirs and one of yours by game's end.
4. Victory points.

And each mission had different special rules (so you might get Deep Strike and he might get Infiltrate and Preliminary Bombardment). Sometimes you were fighting over objectives, sometimes it was straight VP's, and a lot of the time both players would be aiming for different things.

Made things quite interesting in all the games we used it in.

That said, I've often had more fun in the Objective Based missions. One great one from recent memory was in Cities of Death, where I was using one of my Armoured Companies vs a Lost & The Damned army (y'know, back when they had an army list...). It literally came down to the last dice roll - would I immobilise my Exterminator on terrain and lose the mission, or force a draw. In the end I managed to roll a 1, and lost the game, but it came down to the wire, with virtually nothing of each other's forces left (I had the Exterminator and 2 Lascannon Sentinels, he had two Predator Annihilators - this was from a 2000 point list!). Another great one from over four years ago involves the game being decided by a single Combi-Bolter shot from a Chaos Rhino vs a Vyper Jetbike. Three 6's later I won the game, but it was great fun the whole way through.

VP missions, I've often found, turn out to be complete white-washes moreso than the objective ones. I've never had an objectives based white-wash.

BYE

My first experience with multiple objectives was at this year's Baltimore GT. From what I understand, the crew from Adepticon helped develope the missions. Each misison had a Primary, Secondary and Tertiary objective. To be honest, they were some of the best missions I've played in 40K. I'm now a fan of them and hope that is what the next edition utelizes.

That, and change escalation to reflect how Apocolypse reserves work.

I will second the Rules of Engagment. That is the only way to play. Especially if you don't share your objectives with your opponent. It adds a lot to game play.

I would have loved to have seen a combination of 'Alpha' and 'Omega' missions in the BBB: i.e. no VPs, plus escalation to force you to think about the allocation of forces. Or perhaps I've been reading the AT-43 rulebook too much...

*ducks*

Nurglitch wrote:Especially with Apocalypse games being decided based on an objective system like that of Epic: Armageddon it appears that the rumoured 5th edition of Warhammer 40k might change. Victory point games seem to devolve into who can kill each other's stuff the fastest even when victory points are awarded for capturing objectives; after all the easiest way to capture an objective is to kill whatever might defend it!

What do you folks think about the pros and cons of victory points and objectives?

That reminds me of something one of our local IG players always says when we lay out mission objectives.

"so if i kill your entire army i win right?"

Really it can go either way. i played an objective mission with no VPs in my 40K league yesterday and while i decimated his army victory conditions for both sides were not met so the game was a tie.

I use both objectives and victory points in my tournaments.

Sadly, most tournaments are pure drek and don't do so.

I prefer the Adepticon system myself. Three conditions for a battle: Primary, Secondary, and Tertiary. That way VPs can still count but don't dominate the games as they do now.

Alternative to that, I think Objective based missions are the way to go. It greatly increases the tactical aspect of the game. Sure it forces a lot of armies to be more mobile, but how is that different then now? Not even IG can throw down a strict gun line and hope to win. 40k should be about tactical movement just as much as killing the enemy.

The Rules of Engagement missions were the basis of a couple leagues in my local store... and they produced some of the best gaming experiences I've seen. The random mission determination, as well as deployment zone shape, meant that each game was different, even if you got the same missions. Also, you might get one mission, but the opponent gets another, and it becomes a balance between achieving your own objectives and denying him his... which may or may not be compatible possibilities.

Sounds a lot like 2nd edition. We used to keep the missions secret which really made for some interesting games.

I'll post some thoughts on this tomorrow. Well, my experiences running my own tournaments, anyway.

I would like to see the card missions come back. You each get two cards with objectives and your opponent won't know what your trying to achieve and vice versa. Makes it fun to try and guess what your opponant is up to.

Lemartes wrote:I would like to see the card missions come back. You each get two cards with objectives and your opponent won't know what your trying to achieve and vice versa. Makes it fun to try and guess what your opponant is up to.

I came across my mission cards a few months back while I was working at GW, modded them a bit and passed them out to folks playing and they loved it. It definitely makes the game more suspenseful when you don't know what your opponent is really up to.

I would like to see more definite Attacker/Defender type games and unbalanced points + stratagem scenarios like in Apocalypse. To me it would reflect how a real battle might go.

Victory points should still matter, but I think a unit should get more VP's for capturing an objective than for being taken out. example a 100 pt squad holding an objective will receive 200VP. If a 100 pt unit gets destroyed the opponent only gets 100VP from it.

I think each player should get a ramdom mission etc. like the mission cards a lot of people are saying here, hope GW is reading this

Every system will show cracks if it’s the only way of playing, so the best thing to do is keep variety in the mission structure. Some VP games, some objectives only games. I like the suggestion of secret missions, they’d be an interesting variation to include every once in a while – maybe even sometimes playing a combination of stated mission objectives and secret mission objectives? Adding in some attacker/defender missions as well, and you could have a very cool system for randomly generating a wide variety of game types. The current system of randomly rolling for the game type is a good start, but with a more sophisticated system that includes all the above as possibilities and there’s a chance you might hardly ever play the same game twice.


Oh, and objective capturing will continue to be a problem as long as units can capture objectives by running up to them on the last turn. Bringing in a rule that requires units to actually hold objectives, rather than capture them by just flying by them at the last second would solve these problems, and maybe even go a long way towards limiting the dominance of skimmers. Changing the rule so a unit has to spend a whole turn on the objective before counting it as holding the objective would go a long way to solving this problem.

After playing a lot of battlefield 1942, my friends and I baked up a system of holding objectives. We placed 3 "control points" on the board. One on each flank and one in the center. If you had a unit in base to base with the control point from the end of your movement phase until the start of your next movement phase and your opponent did not have any units in base to base with the control point durring that time, you got a certain number of points. The flank control points would give 100 points for each turn you held them, while the center one would give 150. It made for quite a fun game or two. You had to not only get to objectives, but also stay on them as long as possible without any contention. Also, weighting the center to be more valuable than the flanks, concentrated a lot of action in the middle of the table but still made the flanks worth going after.

I think an easy way to do points for holding an objective a certain amount of time would be to have a stash of poker chips, and every turn give a chip for each objective the player holds. Some objectives could be worth two chips or something. Whoever has the most at the end wins.

You could also use this for attacker/defender type missions, where the defender has the objectives, but the attacker more points, so it is a question of whether the attacker can knock the defender off his positions in time to claim enough and catch up.

I would like to see the card missions come back. You each get two cards with objectives and your opponent won't know what your trying to achieve and vice versa. Makes it fun to try and guess what your opponant is up to.

The store I play now has taken the rules from the missions listed in the 4th edition rulebook and converted them into a card format. There are cards for deployment and objectives amongst other mission conditions. Each pack of cards is shuffled prior to the game then you and your opponent draw from them to determine the mission. It is pretty neat because you and your opponent may have different objectives. Also there are both a primary and secondary objective which keeps it interesting.

- G

With the recent 5th Ed rumour tightening things down to Troops Scoring, it looks like GW has finally seen the light of Objectives over VPs.

Since Jervis Johnson is in charge I imagine they've known about the merits of objectives over victory points for some time now. At least since Jervis starting writing Epic 40k and definitely since he started writing Epic Armageddon.