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 vict0988 wrote:
You can score about 10 VP against a balanced Guard list if you kill all the appropriate units and you take a kill secondary, I don't think that's over the top and I am still very convinced that spamming Intercessors is less dangerous to the health of the game than spamming Guardsmen is.

You can score 10VP against a balanced Guard list just by killing infantry- 10 squads of Guardsmen (let alone Conscripts) is a mere 550pts, barely over a quarter of a 2K army. There's no intrinsic need for Guard to be easier to score VP against than more elite factions, but that's what the current secondary objective system does.

Again, look to tournament performance in 9th: Armies that are easy to score secondaries against have not been faring well. They're getting unfairly penalized, and balanced Guard or Tyranid armies can present just as many targets for a particular secondary as a skew list from a more elite faction.

 vict0988 wrote:
I think that can be factored into the pts cost of Carnifexes, there are always going to be less competitive units, going to a "by pts value" system would not change that. Given how Redemptor Dreadnoughts have 10+ wounds I actually think you'd be buffing Dreadnoughts more than Carnifexes by going over to "by pts value" since Carnifexes only give 1VP and cost more than half a Redemptor and a fully kitted out Dakka Fex is 160 while the VolCon is only 150.

If VP is tied directly to points, then at least that makes for an easier metric for balancing. Having points costs reflect not only battlefield capability but the implications of the scoring system is inevitably going to produce weird results, and makes it harder to then adjust that scoring system due to unintended ramifications. It's backwards; points should be based on battlefield capability and then VP based on causing degradation of the enemy's capability, rather than VP being an arbitrary metric and points adjusted depending on how the VP system impacts a particular model.

Could you make a system where you just score 1VP for each model you kill, and then make units like Guardsmen dirt cheap to compensate? Sure. Would it be superior, or easier to balance, or otherwise advantageous over even the current system? Hell no.

 vict0988 wrote:
Would you consider a Guard list with 15 characters worth a total of 500 pts to have the same level of character skew as an SM list with 500 pts spent on 5 characters?

Absolutely. 100%. It is literally the same level of skew; 25% of points spent on characters. The number of models that 500pts represents does not and should not matter. 200 Guardsmen is not 50x more skew than 4 Knights.

 vict0988 wrote:
It seems like that has already been more than baked into the points costs of Gladiators, a Hunter is only 110 pts, same as a Hydra. I think the question is whether the GW has to factor in that Gladiators are hurt less badly by the anti-vehicle skew secondary than Hunters or whether players have to use calculators to determine VP.

Like I said above, tweaking points based on VP rather than having VP be based on points creates weird adjustments and is difficult to balance in aggregate. It would make far more sense to balance points values around their actual value in-game, and then construct a VP system that appropriately takes that value into account.

We've seen odd results where units that should be decent are instead bad due to secondaries; Penitent Engines thanks to Gangbusters in ITC comes to mind. You could drop their points, risk making them overtuned, and try to find a sweet spot where they're cheap enough to overcome their VP vulnerability without being OP... Or you could just come up with a VP system that makes any kind of sense and reflects their actual capabilities/value.

 vict0988 wrote:
Very interesting ideas. Have you played any games that had a secondary mission objective that rewarded aerial recon or something similar? The rewards for bringing a unit capable of doing an aerial recon existing in one mission and not another one would be somewhat arbitrary as well right? Getting rid of pick your own secondaries would make the game easier for newbs, the old secondaries were uninspiring, I am definitely inspired now.

I've played plenty of games that didn't use player-set objectives and didn't need artificial secondary objectives to patch over listbuilding flaws. The problem with 40K is that the game is so tactically shallow that there's no organic incentive to balanced capabilities; there's no aerial recon as an in-game mechanic, so the only way to incentivize bringing aircraft (besides optimizing for raw damage output) is to overtly reward bringing that capability and using it in a specific way. Infantry don't offer inherent benefits versus other unit types, so the only direct way to incentivize bringing at least a few is to provide an objective that rewards it.

Compare to something like Dropzone Commander where if you don't bring infantry you will lose because holding urban terrain is something only infantry can do and that's core to the game, but also if you don't bring airborne transport you will lose because infantry are slow, and if you don't bring any tanks you will lose because you need fire support to cover them, et cetera. There are organic incentives built into the various unit types that discourage picking a single unit and spamming it, because that game measures the value of a unit in ways beyond how much firepower it contributes and how hard it is to kill.

You can score about 10 VP against a balanced Guard list if you kill all the appropriate units and you take a kill secondary, I don't think that's over the top and I am still very convinced that spamming Intercessors is less dangerous to the health of the game than spamming Guardsmen is.

I dont think you understand where we're coming from here. Im guessing you only play marines, in which case I can see why you wouldnt see any issue with this system as is.

Try running a guard army with 9th edition secondaries. It is miserable, especially against elite armies like marines. It doesnt matter if I dont give up full points, the points I do have are way easier for you to get, and Im going to give up more of them at any given point level. Compare two conscripts to an intercessor. The conscripts are half as many pts to bring but give up the same VP, and I guarantee you a single intercessor is going to accomplish far more than two conscripts. This is not a thing where the marine player is just a better general than the guard player, its an objective fact that mission actively favors one codex and penalizes another, and tournament results prove it.

The entire point of Imperial Guard is we run lots of cheap units supported by a lot of cheap characters and tanks. Thats in the over 20 years of lore the army is built on, thats supported by the rules the army is built around, heck the very first page of the codex says thats how you should run them. Your claim that a bunch of guardsmen is more problematic than a bunch of primaris sounds a bit insane when the entire point of the Imperial Guard is that we have a ton of cheap infantry, tanks, and characters. Thats the design intent of our army, its what we are supposed to do. And we're not the only army built on that. Tyranids, Tau, GSC, certain chaos lists, eldar variants all struggle with this, and guess who are all at the bottom? So when you design a mission structure that only cares about number of units and not their value, you are designing an inherently inbalanced mechanic from the start.

The whole point of matched play and points is that two players can meet up for a game and have a fair fight. In what universe is it fair that my company commander with 4 wounds and 5+ save is worth the same as a primaris bike chaplain who drops all damage done to him down to 1, even if he got shot in the face with a volcano cannon? Especially when the marine player has a sniper unit that can shoot through walls without seeing the target? And yes, I know that profile is kind of trash, but it doesnt need to be amazing to drop an IG infantry character.

Its not even like the math has to be hard. We have PL. A 2k game will have roughly 100pl per side. I dont think itd be that hard to calculate the PL of all the characters killed from a 2000pt list for a kill secondary.

As the system sits right now, if youre not playing an elite army, or something with hilariously busted rules like DE and Admech had, you are playing with a handicap. You will bleed points from the get go while your opponent has a few very tough units, often being healed or made tougher by things like transhuman, pysker spells, apothecary etc. I want to be clear, I have 0 problems with marines having beatstick characters that are way tougher than mine. All I want is that when I put in the effort to kill a 150pt character that can oneshot anything in my list, I get rewarded with more victory points than my opponent got for killing a 30pt commissar who doesnt even get an invuln save. I dont feel like thats too much to ask.

What points/PL values would you want to award how much VP? Would you put a cap lower than 15VP on the mission?

- HEAD OF THE SNAKE: Score 1 victory point at the end of the battle for every 50 pts worth of enemy CHARACTERS (excluding MONSTERS and VEHICLES) destroyed this battle.
- DRAGONSLAYERS: Score 1 victory point at the end of the battle for every 100 pts worth of enemy MONSTERS and VEHICLES destroyed this battle.
- BUTCHER'S BILL: Score 1 victory point at the end of the game for every 100 pts worth of enemy units (excluding CHARACTERS, MONSTERS and VEHICLES) destroyed this battle.

- LIQUIDATE: Score 1 victory point (to a maximum of 10) at the end of the battle for every 25 pts worth of enemy CHARACTERS (excluding MONSTERS and VEHICLES) destroyed this battle.
- VANQUISH: Score 1 victory point (to a maximum of 10) at the end of the battle for every 50 pts worth of enemy MONSTERS and VEHICLES destroyed this battle.
- EXTREMIS SANCTION: Score 1 victory point (to a maximum of 10) at the end of the game for every 50 pts worth of enemy units (excluding CHARACTERS, MONSTERS and VEHICLES) destroyed this battle.

 catbarf wrote:
Having points costs reflect not only battlefield capability but the implications of the scoring system is inevitably going to produce weird results, and makes it harder to then adjust that scoring system due to unintended ramifications. It's backwards; points should be based on battlefield capability and then VP based on causing degradation of the enemy's capability, rather than VP being an arbitrary metric and points adjusted depending on how the VP system impacts a particular model.

Battlefield capability is the ability to win the mission and scoring and giving up secondaries is part of that, the ability to survive enemy attacks, mobility and damage performance is only important if it helps score VP or prevents the opponent from scoring VP. It's impossible to design a mission to be perfectly balanced for 1000 units with different costs, ITC missions proved that when SM 2.0 was released. You can fine-tune points for 1000 units to be balanced in one mission set with enough balance passes. I don't think it's much more difficult to balance a unit that costs 150-190 pts and awards either 1VP or 1,5-1,9VP for Bring It Down.

 MrMoustaffa wrote:
Try running a guard army with 9th edition secondaries. It is miserable, especially against elite armies like marines.

The same is going to be true for any faction that is underpowered in any mission set. I don't see why Astra Militarum cannot work under the current mission regime with a new codex, they've got all the tools they need, MFM 2020 just worked better as abstract art than as a balance pass and MFM 2021 didn't fix everything.

By making Guard have a weakness in the missions that allows opponents to score VP by killing lots of Guard you can put more of the unit's power budget into a lower pts cost, that allows Guard players to field more Guardsmen on average. By making Space Marines have a weakness in the missions that allows opponents to score VP by killing a moderate amount of Marines you can put more of the unit's power budget into a lower pts cost, that allows SM players to field more Marines, this turns Marines into a horde army to compensate for expensive units leaking VP. GW just forgot to downcost Guard and upcost Marines. I complained about the % pts increases for Intercessors, CSM and Guard in CA20.

Could do a combined kill-count plus percentage method?

Something like 5pts for at least 3 infantry units killed AND at least 25% of all enemy infantry units/models (either could work) killed, 10pts for 6 units AND >50% killed, 15pts 9 units AND >75% killed. Adjust exact values to balance.

That way it can be bracketed to work against more limited lists, but also not punish hordes too much. Not too hard to calculate either.

 Haighus wrote:
Could do a combined kill-count plus percentage method?

Something like 5pts for at least 3 infantry units killed AND at least 25% of all enemy infantry units/models (either could work) killed, 10pts for 6 units AND >50% killed, 15pts 9 units AND >75% killed. Adjust exact values to balance.

That way it can be bracketed to work against more limited lists, but also not punish hordes too much. Not too hard to calculate either.

Not too hard, no. But still at least 1 step more work than I'm interested in doing.

 Haighus wrote:
Could do a combined kill-count plus percentage method?

Something like 5pts for at least 3 infantry units killed AND at least 25% of all enemy infantry units/models (either could work) killed, 10pts for 6 units AND >50% killed, 15pts 9 units AND >75% killed. Adjust exact values to balance.

That way it can be bracketed to work against more limited lists, but also not punish hordes too much. Not too hard to calculate either.

I like the idea, but how about keeping the scoring as is, but doing the cap by percentages? You still get VP per unit, but no more than 5 VP per 25% in the enemy army - meaning you can only max out the secondary when the unit type actually made up at least 75% of the enemy army.

 vict0988 wrote:
By making Guard have a weakness in the missions that allows opponents to score VP by killing lots of Guard you can put more of the unit's power budget into a lower pts cost, that allows Guard players to field more Guardsmen on average.

Then Marine players scream bloody murder about how their infantry get gunned down point-for-point by overperforming Guardsmen, and if you don't get the points balance just right you'll see Guardsman carpets once again winning tournaments by swarming the board with their artificially-cheap troops and locking their opponents out on primaries.

Making an army deliberately slightly OP for the points on the premise that VP vulnerability will balance it out is a very, very fine line to walk, because the better you kill your opponent the fewer VP you give up in any case. It's also the sort of thing that leads to player heartburn- BFG used exactly this mechanic for Necrons (OP for the points, but you scored tons of VP for even damaging them), and while fluffy and thematic a lot of players found it miserable to actually play.

This seems like an absurdly roundabout solution to players not being bothered to do basic math to work out how many points of stuff they killed. Or even just PL as mentioned would work completely fine. How long does it actually take to work out the PL of a list? Is two minutes of VP tallying at the end of a two-hour game to determine the outcome really that bad?

 vict0988 wrote:

By making Guard have a weakness in the missions that allows opponents to score VP by killing lots of Guard you can put more of the unit's power budget into a lower pts cost, that allows Guard players to field more Guardsmen on average. By making Space Marines have a weakness in the missions that allows opponents to score VP by killing a moderate amount of Marines you can put more of the unit's power budget into a lower pts cost, that allows SM players to field more Marines, this turns Marines into a horde army to compensate for expensive units leaking VP. GW just forgot to downcost Guard and upcost Marines. I complained about the % pts increases for Intercessors, CSM and Guard in CA20.

I suspect it'd just be a lot easier to cost guardsmen appropriate to their actual combat performance and to instead rationalize the objectives in the first place, rather than trying to layer this other dimension in on top to fine tune at a level where guardsmen already see huge issues with single point balances changes due to granularity problems. It sounds like a whole lot of extra complication and potential failure points without adding any meaningful depth to the game. I don't think anyone can legitimately say that using Value based scoring as opposed to Unit based scoring would, or would have, found Guard turning into some metagame mission scoring monster that was otherwise held in check. Quite frankly, the army doesn't have great tools to make use of that ability for such purposes, and intentionally handicapping an army (built around attrition of small units by explicitly punishing attrition of small units) is going to have oppressive gameplay results. These sorts of mechanics through multiple editions have done far more to keep Guard from being considered competitive at all as opposed to holding them in any sort of balance check, when they Guard armies have been powerful, it's never really been due to the benefits of MSU and mission scoring but rather raw killing ability.

Even easier fix is just to stop fixing Guardsmen into static unit numbers, like basically every other army out there has.

I've been playing TONS of 4th edition games lately.

Tallying VP at the end is actually super fun, as it really makes you analyze the game.

For example, my last game I was playing Recon against a Tau player. In Recon, you get VPs for enemy units destroyed, and add the VPs for the cost of scoring units in your DZ.

My armageddon got a swarm of units into the enemy DZ (well, an infantry squad, an officer whose retinue had been killed, and a chimera). My opponent got a single Crisis squad (Tau) into my DZ. Most of the other units were bogged down in midboard fighting and whatnot (my breakthrough was on a very narrow front and his Crisis team arrived by DS).

He was convinced he had lost the game based on the appearance of the board at the end (sheer number of models around). I told him his Crisis Team was still scoring and he said "yea, that's cheap."

Well, it turned out to be 201 points. That might be cheap for a Tau unit (I have no idea) but it's certainly more expensive than my breakthrough (roughly 180 points). We each killed about 1k points (he got like 1045 of mine, I got like 965) and the rulebook offers a margin of error for victory - if the scores are within 10% of the total at the end of the game (e.g. 200 points for our game) then it's a draw.

This postgame board analysis yielded several insights for both players, and functioned as a "hotwash":

For the Imperial Guard:
1) Retinues are actually really important. Previously I'd considered them a constraint - my character is LOCKED IN to this unit, whilst other armies can do whatever they want with their characters. This is true, but retinues actually also make officers into scoring units (by allowing them to not be Independent Characters) which means that killing the retinue off is both a boon and a curse, and I have to be prepared to adapt my plan based on that insight (a Guard Captain can go from "scoring unit" to "pretty good support character", trading one role for another among many).

2) Chimera spam (quantity) is a quality all its own. My shooting didn't ultimately do a terrible amount of damage to the Tau, and I lost all but like 3 Chimeras, but they're so cheap that I was able to blitz forwards with them and get 1 scoring Chimera into their DZ, with friends.

For the Tau:
1) Their "cheap" units are still FAR MORE EXPENSIVE than the Imperial Guard's, meaning that whilst I might have 3 scoring units near an objective, they might only need 1 to counteract my scoring. (since it's done by points value rather than models)

2) Their firepower alone can't stop a mass advance supported by dismounted infantry, so some of their units might actually have to get into combat to prevent scoring. They have to balance this carefully with throwing units away - I get points for scoring, but I also get points for killing. This means that units like Broadsides, which traditionally would be kept out of combat at ALL COSTS, might actually be useful for bullying IG away from objectives given that IG will struggle to kill them in combat (i.e. I can't get points). However, watch out for power fists!!

I don't know which multiple editions Guard have been bad because of No Prisoners-like rules. Guard were competitive in 5th and 8th, so are we talking 3rd and 4th or 6th and 7th? No Prisoners also isn't anti-MSU, it's anti-horde. Giant hordes take forever to move and hordes have few counters, that's why there needs to be an anti-horde secondary. I don't want to see 200 Brimstone Horrors again, but I also would like to see some Brimstone Horrors, the 5 point minimum unwritten rule is heavy-handed and No Prisoners makes it entirely unneeded, not having 5,1 or 5,3 pt units is also just an unwritten rule that should be broken when appropriate. There shouldn't be units that cost 5,3 pts that are worth 3 pts or 7 pts, like when Monoliths used to cost 381 pts but were worth 340, but if GW were really sure that 5 pts was too little and 5,5 too much then I think using smaller fractions would be 100% fine. Nobody should be using their head to calculate pts in armies anyway, it's too flawed.

A plasma gun cannot kill more than 11 pts of Guardsmen per turn. There might need to be an anti-2+Sv secondary, but there doesn't need to be an anti-Marine secondary, because your lasguns, plasma guns and your lascannons can all get decent value shooting at Intercessors, Hellblasters and Heavy Intercessors.

Grind Them Down is anti-MSU, but I think it's pretty fair because there are countless rewards for going MSU instead of taking bigger units in 9th. Allowing Guard squads to go up to 30 would fix the issue of being forced to go MSU if you want a good number of Guardsmen, Orders have already gotten even more broken than they were in terms of efficiency so that's not really a concern anymore.

I played against 90 Guardsmen lists in 8th edition ITC, being able to M!M!M! them all over the board was a major strength for holding objectives and blocking movement. Having 55 pt units able to do actions is a strength in the Eternal War missions. I just think the points have ended up being too much for them to be viable, I don't really think No Prisoners plays into it too much. Why aren't 60 Guardsmen lists tearing up the meta if No Prisoners is the only thing keeping Guardsmen down? If I try out Guard I might see whatever it is I am missing. I'd think if anything would make Guardsmen easier to balance it would be having less of their power budget tied up in Voice of Command.

Being unable to determine whether you are winning and what actions you need to take to win is bad mission design for a competitive mission set. You might as well award random bonus VP to both players at the end of the game. Keeping a running tally of models killed is pretty easy, keeping a pts tally is more difficult and I think in the games in 8th where my group used a custom mission set with bonus VP for killing units we always just did it at the end, so we also ended up having some surprise wins once in a while, followed by a "just as planned". I think having randomness at the end of the game is good for casual mission sets to keep things interesting, I am in favour of random game length in casual mission sets for example. Of course for random game length to mean anything lethality cannot be through the roof...