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Hi Members,
I played in many tournaments where painting, sportsmanship and army composition were rewarded and penalized.

In the area of "Army Composition" there were restrictions that came from or were mostly copied from GWS standards. Here's a cut and pasted example"

-Army Composition will be judged by me prior to the day of the tournament. Army lists will be submitted in advance (more on that later). Each participant starts with 10 points and loses 2 points for each of the following criteria (to a minimum of 0 points):
1. Army contains a Lord-level Special Character.
2. Army contains 1+ Hero-level Special Characters.
3. Army contains 2 of the same Rare choice (3+ in the case of High Elves).
4. Army contains 3+ of the same Special choice (4+ in the case of High Elves).
5. Army contains only the minimum number of Core choices (units which do not count towards minimum Core, such as Furies or Bat Swarms are not counted).
6. Army contains 10+ power dice. Each bound spell with a power level of 3 or 4 counts as a single power die. Each bound spell with a power level of 5+ counts as 2 power dice. In a Tomb Kings army, each die rolled for an Incantation counts as 1 power die. The Casket of Souls counts as 2 power dice. The Banner of Sorcery counts as 2 power dice. The Sacrificial Dagger counts as 2 power dice. Each Power Stone counts as a single power die.
7. Army contains 3+ units and/or characters that can Fly.
8. Army contains any single unit and/or character that cost 450+ points.
9. Army contains 2+ units and/or characters that cause Terror.
10. Army contains 3+ of the same Core units (non-missile weapon infantry units do not count)*
*For the purposes of these criteria, Horrors of Tzeentch count as being equipped with missile weapons.

Now my question is this. If a player chose to play a Daemon army of completely one god should he be penalized??? Should an exception be made for Daemonic players?

For Example: Daemonic Khorne player has only one option in each of Core, Special and Rare choices (Bloodletters, Flesh Hounds and BloodCrushers?) Should he be penalized for bringing 4 units of Bloodletters or 3 units of Flesh hounds or 2 units of Bloodcrushers?

Or say Tzeencth which only has Screamers as a Special. He if he took 3 -4 units of Screamers?

You can look at the High Elves for example. They can take 6 special choices and have 9 to choose from.

Thanks
Sandy Death

I think you're gonna have to set up some guidelines for individual armies. Like you point out with mono-God Daemon armies, certain themed armies will be penalized unfairly if you apply this rubric to it. For instance - would you penalize someone taking a Dwarf Slayers list for filling their Specials with Slayers?

I would drop all the "sames", possibly changing them to something like

"Does the army have more than 1 rare choice?"
"Does the army have more than 3 special choices?"

Don't cut the HE any slack in here. You can't tell someone 4 DE bolt throwers is bad from a composition/gameplay prespective and 4 HE ones aren't.

I would change the first one to
"Does the army have any Lord level characters."

You can't tell me that someone should be punished for taking a Red Host Skink Cohort with Tenhiuan as thier general and that is somehow worse than a tooled out VC lord, WoC lord, or Slaan.

10+ PD is still pretty darn high. Depending on how "compy" you want to bring it to, I might lower that to an 8. Also, be careful here. Some items are you don't have listed have the same net effect...Diadem of Power, Black Perapit. I would check out something like the WPS system and take a look at their magic discussion section for a decent starting point.

Well Shotgun,
Here's what happened.

A Nurgle player had as his General this monsterous Forge World beast with 10 wounds and a cost of 650 points (the tourney was 2250 points) plus like 4 units of PBs, and 2 units of 2-3 Beasts of Nurgle so he got tatooed on Composition. Now I can see the General being a big minus but should 4 units of Plaguebearers?

Sandy

@Shotgun: Seriously? You'd penalize people for using up more than one rare and 3 Specials? The purpose of the "sames" is generally to promote the use of many units, rather than just "the best" unit in a given army.

Also, with regard to High Elves - at a standard tourney size (2000-2250 points) they are allowed 4 rares as opposed to most other armies 2. However, their options are limited to 1 RBT or Great Eagle per choice as opposed to say a DE's 2 RBTs for 1 Rare. There's no "slack" being given with the 3+ restriction for them, it amounts to an equivalent penalty.

Also, Lord level characters aren't inherently cheesy. Certain armies have particularly broken/strong lords, but not every army. Your change penalizes a lot of armies unfairly just to detract a few.

SandyDeath wrote:Now I can see the General being a big minus but should 4 units of Plaguebearers?

Sandy

If they have Heralds in them, then yes.

Btw, mono-gos armies can do fine...The core doesnt' count, so take all the Bloodletters you want in a Khorne list. 2 specials and 1 rare would make it a decent army. (Same with any of the other chaos gods - Tzeentch takes an automatic penalty (or two) but the Tzeentch core are widely considered to be the best core, especially if you MSU them.)

A good comp system will ignore 'theme' anyways. That belongs in appearance. The only thing comp should grade is the power of the list, which is usually generated by overloading one aspect of the game.

I do like the WPS comp system though (Can be hard to find)

Why would they have got any penalties for PB or Bloodletters? The rules sopecifically state NON MISSILE INFANTRY is excluded!

A workable tzeentch list would have no isues - would lose a couple of points for horrors and couple points for scribes or kairos, but can build a workable army out of it.

However, they shouldnt get any breaks - you play daemons, welcome to being hit by a nerf bat comp wise. A tourney coming up has daemons in their own special slot, comp wise, and they start with fewer comp points than anyone.

Can you start on 0 or -? if i was to make an effective EHFB army now it would possibly be starting out at -20 or so

Yes No1001,
You are correct that there is no penalty for Daemon core choices. That was put in only for missile troops to prevent gun lines. But most armies I've run across pretty much always max their Special (4) and Rare (2) choices out. To do that in a Daemon Mono-God army would mean 4 units of Flesh hounds or Screamers and or 2 units of Flamers, Fiends and Bloodcrushers.

Let me ask the responders to this thread this: Are most of your tournaments Composition restricted and penalized or do the tourney sponcers simply say, "Bring what you want" within the GWS official army rules ( 4 special, 2 rare in 2000-2999) ?


Sandy

The guidelines hurt certain armies and do nothing to others. You should just get a judge who knows the game well and judge:

Is the list min/maxed?
Is this a spam list?
Are there any automatic BS tricks(terror bomb, Masque, Engine of the gods....)?

The first 2 questions cover most comp issues and the 3rd is just my personal pet peeve.

Jin wrote:@Shotgun: Seriously? You'd penalize people for using up more than one rare and 3 Specials? The purpose of the "sames" is generally to promote the use of many units, rather than just "the best" unit in a given army.

If I was trying to curb the use of specials and rares, yep. The existing system would allow for a huge unit of flamers and a big block of juggers while penalizing someone who took two single Beasts of Nurgle.

Also, with regard to High Elves - at a standard tourney size (2000-2250 points) they are allowed 4 rares as opposed to most other armies 2. However, their options are limited to 1 RBT or Great Eagle per choice as opposed to say a DE's 2 RBTs for 1 Rare. There's no "slack" being given with the 3+ restriction for them, it amounts to an equivalent penalty.

My mind slipped up there. I'm a DE player by heart and its been ages since I cracked my HE book.

Also, Lord level characters aren't inherently cheesy. Certain armies have particularly broken/strong lords, but not every army. Your change penalizes a lot of armies unfairly just to detract a few.

Lord level specials aren't inherently cheesey either, unless you have some kind of magical reason to justify that something like Teeto'eko is "worse" than a tooled out vamp lord just by the nature of being a "special character". It is silly to assume that "special character" status somehow automatically makes a Lord broken and therefore worthy of a comp point docking.


Your last sentence, however, should be on every comp statement around.

Comp: penalizing everyone just to punish a few.

Our next tourny is using a banding system: you get a base score dependent on which army you play, and then the list is judged on how cheesy it is, whcih then modifies your base score.

So if you bring a cheesy as hell daemon army you start on 0. Bring a fluffy OK you can end up on +800. Each game you play the difference in VP is given to the play with the higher initial score, so in the aove example the OK player would have +800VP before starting the game - or in other words a 7-3 score (10-0 for 2000+ VP difference, etc) for the tourny.

WHile this is highly reliant on the judge and their partly subjective tests, it works a lot better than the specific rules listed above - WHFB has too many variables to make a list like that work.

(For example i didnt spot anything about the Slaan free power dice being factored in - that can get you to 10 in an army very easily!)

Meh.

If you use an army comp score as a tournament organizer, you are inherently admitting that you feel that certain army compositions give an unfair advantage and the comp score is an attempt to balance the field.

Do I Think compositions scores should be used? No. Not ever.

Do I think that sportsmanship should be list-inclusive in order to "ding" a superhardtard WAAC list afterwards? Absolutely.

Do I think it's "fair" to tell a single god chaos list that he'll get dinged for bringing his list. Yes.

It's up to the player to know whether or not his list fits within the restrictions prior to the tournament. I, as a tournament organizer, have the right to manipulate the tournament any way I want. It's up to you, if you don't think it's fair, not to show up. Or instead to tweak your list to maximize your points, while still remaining competitive.

The normal problem with "tweaking" army comp, is while you minimize the impact of armies that typically tend to be super combat monsters you overbalance on some other factor, and create a mostly favorable set of matchups for some other army that you just didn't expect. Allowing a really good player to find that loophole, and exploit the tournament for the win.

Which is why I say: Let the guys at GW do the balancing.