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An idea that had surfaced in my FLGS was to combine both VPs and KPs. This is to keep the penalty for unit spamming and such that KP gives, while not completely screwing armies that are forced to have higher than normal KP counts. There were two ways that were suggested to do this. The first idea was that a player needs to have both a higher amount of kill points AND victory points to win a game. If the results were split, then it would be a tie. The other idea was to again tally up both amounts and give a player an 50 or 100 victory point bonus for each kill point he scored. (The actual points amount is still up for debate.) Basically the idea is to keep the balancing effect that kill points can impose on army lists, while limiting the ability of someone to win a game due to extreme kill point imbalances.

Every time I think of a new way to do KP, I always come back to VP being the most fair. I mean KP in any way/shape/form are not realistic (IMO). I could take a fully kitted out squad of 20 CSM (yes, 20) with the MoN, special weapons and upgrades, and that is still the same as a 10 man IG squad that will die in an instant. The difference? My squad would be a ridiculous amount of points.

I was thinking for every 1-50 points a unit costs, they get 1 KP and that is how much they are worth. It's easy to calculate (you could even do this before the game and mark it down) and seems to be pretty fair). For example a 10 man CSM squad with 2 Meltaguns is 170 points, which would be 4 KPs. Personally if there is a way to combine both KPs and VP and have it fair... this is it. Though I'm not some super rules guru so if there's others (or if this is completely wrong), I'd like to hear them

PS. Your username + sig is hilarious. Baseketball is the greatest movie

The issue with your solution, is that it essentially IS just victory points. It would also encourage people to try and get units at specific points values like exactly 150 or exactly 100 which is I think is a step in the wrong direction. There are things about kill points that I like in that it forces you to protect everything despite how much it costs. For the throw away units, I think they should have made a new special rule called Expendable which would essentially mean that the unit wouldn't give up kill points. This could be given to things like gun drones, swarms, conscripts. To balance it out you could also prevent them from contesting objectives and from IC's joining the unit or something like that.

I still like the quick solution JohnHwangDD and I hashed out over in discussions.

Your KP total is the number of KPs you inflicted on the enemy PLUS the KPs you have remaining in your army.

and this is why i love playing VP rather than KP
guard get screwed over big time.
tau drones become a free KP.

JourneyPsycheOut wrote:The issue with your solution, is that it essentially IS just victory points. It would also encourage people to try and get units at specific points values like exactly 150 or exactly 100 which is I think is a step in the wrong direction. There are things about kill points that I like in that it forces you to protect everything despite how much it costs. For the throw away units, I think they should have made a new special rule called Expendable which would essentially mean that the unit wouldn't give up kill points. This could be given to things like gun drones, swarms, conscripts. To balance it out you could also prevent them from contesting objectives and from IC's joining the unit or something like that.

Sorta... but if a unit was worth 51 points (2 KP) it would be the same as one worth 99 points (also 2 KP) so its not the same as VP... since the latter unit would be worth more. Really what it comes down to is that VP are much more effective than KP.

Though I must admit, your idea is pretty good (having the Expendable rule). Alternatively, Chaplains (or JohnHwangDDs) idea is also quite good and seems easiest for A) players that cant be bothered with VP or B) players that want to keep it relatively simple.

Though I think some of us old vets with still play with VP, no matter what the case

Intrestingly victory points used to be worked out that way in 2nd edition 40K, it was one of the things they got rid of. Which I'm not too sorry about.

One theory that I quite liked was that you would divide the points value of your army by the number of units in it. So you have each unit with an 'average' VP value as a kill point.

So an army with two warbosses each with a horde of nobs, would have 4 kill points still but each KP would be worth about 300 VPs. Similarly if a IG army turns up with 15 units total each of those would be worth a mere 100 points.
It works as a sort of leveling system but then you get people blasting away cheap stuff because its worth more and preserving the majority of their army's value by having a boat load of sniper drones hide behind a house.

I do support (limited) use of an Expendable rule, things like Grots, Conscripts, and the varities of suicidal stuff in the inquisition codexes (most assassins, arco-flagellents etc).

Any system other than VP messes up wars of Attrition Gaurd, Nid's, Orks)

How do you penalise army's which take multiple small units (particularly in the troops section)?

In 4th, objectives could only be claimed by 'viable' units - i.e ones above half strength, mobile vehicles, etc which gave an incentive to take larger units that could survive sufficiently intact to claim objectives. The downside was that damage to these units could potentially give up a lot of VP's

Now that everything can claim/contest to the last man the best way to win objective missions is to have lots of units, but this is penalised by KP's which are easier to amass when your opponent takes MSU's.


However you do it, you need to balance these competing ways of building an army so that all missions are challenging and you are forced to compromise in your army selection.

I would say that the 4th ed version made more sense but sadly as long as Alessio 'Math is Hard' Cavatore is writing rulebooks we have to keep things simple.


In fairness to the new system, however, only two armies (Tau and IG) have serious problems. These can be easily fixed by the addition of simple rules into their new codices:

'Life is Cheap' (IG) - Conscript, Penal Legion and Line Infantry do not give up KP's when they die, but everything else does.
'For the Greater Good' - Drones do not give up KP's when they die, but everything else does.

Both of these are very fluffy. The Tau will not be concerned over the loss of Drones - vehicles are a valuable asset and they cannot afford to lose their soldiers. The IG couldn't care less about the bulk of the PBI, but officer squads, specially trained or equipped units like HW and SW squads, snipers, stormies, vets etc are a genuine loss. Likewise the Adeptus Mechanicus gets very upset over the loss of vehicles and these are much harder to replace than guardsmen.


Now, whether GW will do any of this is a matter for debate. We can only hope they do or we'll be stuck with the current, unsatisfactory, state of affairs until the next edition (and then we need to hope they'll stop trying to cater for the lowest common denominator...).