Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

OK..

I am not a tournament gamer by choice, I like to play for fun. My gaming club does, however, run a medium-ish RTT in the summer at Origins Game Fair in Columbus, OH. Last year was our first, and coming up this year is year 2.

So, I have been reading all these threads recently about Comp in Tournaments, and realized..

I don't know what "Comp" really means. It seems to be internet shorthand for.. Composition? Compensation?

Is a low score good/bad? does it indicate that a list is truly nasty if it is a 1? Does the scale normally go from 1-20?

Help me understand this..

Right now, our little RTT has no comp score category (and we are thinking it won't). We plan to look over lists in advance, if only to make sure that army lists are legal and pointed properly.

-Porkuslime

Composition. A low score is generally bad as your composition score is often added into your overall score.

I wanted to make it up to Origins last year but couldn't because of work... maybe I'll make it this year. I heard it was a blast. Also, are you one of the guys that hit up Corbet's RTTs in Columbus? Great events...

It WAS a blast.. this year we have the RTT as well as an attempt at "Largest Apoc Game in the US" .. hubris maybe, but last year we had 200k points committed , and then only 94k points showed up.

I don't think I have been part of any other RTT.. send me a PM about them if you would..

Army Composition is a category of scoring invented by GW to reward/encourage armies which either are weaker/more varied and interesting to face, interestingly-themed (often in a way which handicaps them), or which confirm closely to the background of the game.

Many debates about it come from the nebulous and multifaceted ways in which it has been defined over the years.

It has sometimes been replaced by an Army Theme category, to reward armies which have an interesting or clear theme, often one which expresses part of the game's background, without consideration to an army's power.

When GW introduced it in the late 90s, they used objective rubrics, defined checklists of things an army list had or did not have, which earned points. In the GTs these changed from year to year. When the Rogue Trader Tournament format came out (in 2000, I believe?), which was a standardized format for local score tournaments, it also included its own defined rubric, which I can recall pretty much verbatim. It was a mix of theme questions and questions which seemed designed to ensure that armies used a lot of Troops, and did not min/max or pack in an excessive amount of wargear.

GW (and independent events) have also included subjective comp or theme scoring, in which either a judge or ALL of your opponents rate your army.

All comp systems currently in use have descended from these, and there are many variations.

There are many debates over the necessity or validity of Composition scoring. The continuing improvements to GW's 40k core rules (particularly the improved clarity and objective/kill points mission balance in 5th edition) and better-balancing of their codices have largely seemed to reduce the necessity of Comp, at least in 40k. In Warhammer, where the imbalance between different army books (particularly the widely-criticised Daemons of Chaos book) is wider, Comp is more widely seen as needed to help handicap and offset these imbalances in tournaments, to allow other books to compete on more even terms.

Comic Shop Plus has some pretty fun tournaments. Corbet ran a few RTTs a while back and I'm assuming he still probably does. I've been busy and haven't been able to make it up there.
http://www.comicshopplus.com/site/showthread.php?t=865

A lot of tournaments for Columbus/Dayton can be found here:
http://40kbasement.com/forum/viewforum.php?f=30&sid=2560551a508718f24610d290cd650ceb

These are also great places to advertise for your Origins RTT. Great guys in both cities!

oh.. we will advertise all around the place here in a couple weeks, I imagine. Several of the 40k Basement guys were at the last one we ran, and we hope to see them again.

GW has changed their Codex design over the past 10 years, and that's really affected composition (for the better in my mind) of armies.

What Composition tries to do is restrict 'min/max' armies. Like mauleed-pattern Marines, where you took 6 troop choices that were 6-marines with a lascannon and plasma rifle. Or, where BA players would take two 5-man scout squads and then take assault termies in landraiders.

With the move to objectives and changes in what's a legal army list, I don't think that Comp is nearly as important as it was 10 years ago.

Comp usually rewards taking a lot of troops, but that's abusable too. Is taking 4 units of Plague Marines, with 2 last princes and some oblits a good 'comp'? You're tying up a lot of points in the troops, but it's still a pretty ugly army. How about orks taking 2 biker bosses and 20 nob bikers, which count as troops? It's a hard army, with a lot of points in the Troops.

As someone who hopes to play in the Origins tourney, I'd say leave comp out of it. It just becomes something of a 'game within the game' - maxing out your comp score. Or, do a generic comp score like:
+2 points - Army is representative of a 40k force
0 points - army isn't representative of its race, but doesn't seem built to win at all costs either
-2 points - Army is build with the intent of hammering the other army, doesn't fit together thematically, and was built to exploit the FOC and/or rules.

There is a lot to be sad that comp nowadays is far less of a crucial component than it was say in 2001 (where oh god was it necessary to keep a vast majority of armies competitive to others (cough cough cheesy Iron Warriors cough cough).

Should TO's decide to use Comp, a simple checklist of wargear, troops, etc in the exact same manner as the Comp scoring from a decade ago makes little sense. That system was quite broken anyways (aka some armies almost always blew away the comp category (Marines) whereas others were so screwed it wasn't funny).

If a checklist were to be used (which imo isn't such a bad thing if done right), it would have to be specific to each codex much like the list restrictive tournaments that exist in Fantasy (aka the minus such and such points for taking 2+ Engines, ring of hotek, anything Daemons of Chaos (kidding on that last part...sort of))

The only real reason I am ever in favor of Composition points is that you don't see the same lists over and over again. I feel like there's some sort of factory that just spews out identical Vulkan, Mech Guard, & Plague marine armies in some sort of STC fashion. A couple of points for taking rare (read: not as points efficient) units is a-ok by my book, and if that makes me a softy, so be it.