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Recently in my group, a player (who I refer to online as "Tank Man") went to a local bookstore and played a game with a Chaos Marine player. He played Guard, and at the end of the match, he had 2 Leman Russ Tanks, a platoon command squad, a company command squad, and 3 heavy weapons teams left, armed with heavy bolters and lascannons. The chaos player had a rhino, half a squad of plague marines, and 2 devastators left (the heavy weapons guys). The game was annihilation, so it went to kill points. The chaos player won, 13-7. Obviously, in terms of strength left, Tank Man had him beat. But by the rules of the game, the Chaos player won.

Since then, our group has changed all annihilation games from Kill Points, which favor smaller, more expensive armies (cough cough, Marines, cough cough), to victory points, which is a more fair way of calculating such things. Others in our group have expressed that VPs are also not fair, just in a different way, but they also don't know how to make it as fair as possible, and agree for the time being that it should be VPs until something else can be figured out.

What about you guys? Do you have other house rules for annihilation?

Carry on playing the game until the opponent is tabled?
I usually have more fun playing it this way.
A dead army can't claim they won.

VPs use the points each unit costs right? I can't see why KPs even exist, as they make certain types of army utter garbage, just by technicality.

DakkaDakka wrote:

I personally prefer Victory Points for the exact reason you outlined. I realize GW wanted to make points scoring simpler (and not math intensive), but I never minded totaling up Victory Points.

However, Guard do have a defense when playing Annihilation. Just glob them all up into one huge, unkillable squad worth only 1 KP!

I like Victory Points more, but Kill Points balance out many lists. For instance, how fair is a BA Razorback spam list without kill points? I can have 5-6 lascannons on transports with no repurcussions - with kill points in the mix, you're not as apt to take a super mech-afied list.

IG comes to mind as well in terms of abusing leaf blower lists with no downside. Honestly I think kill points balance out Marines.

Again, I prefer VP, but KP have a place, especially in more competitive settings.

Che-Vito wrote:I like victory points because it's pretty simple. You earn what you kill.

This. KP's is just obnoxious. My friends always play annihilation with VP's.

Hi folks.
There are many ways to determine victory .
KP is a very 'contrived system', that can be abused quite badly.
PV is dependant on the PV being an acurate reflection of the unit worth, and can be seen as a bit fiddely by some.

IF we awarded points on unit rarety not PV value.
Eg
Troop Units = 1 point.

Fast Attack -Heavy Support units =2 points.

Elite units =3 points.

HQ units= 4 points.

It would better reflect the impact of the loss of the unit type on its army.

Its not perfect, but does give a simple and intuitive loading .That allows players to win by tactical targeting of more important units....

What do you folks think?

TTFN

VP's are better. Alternatively total how much you have left ALIVE and add +200vps for each objective for example. Something other than the 'simple' KPs which ruin many armies. Nid's don't care if they loose 2 units of gaunts. Also with KP 3 x 10 gaunts is more valuable than 2x 15 gaunts which makes little sense

I'm glad it's not just me that felt that was about KP.

The little group I play with tends to uses Victory Points because... well pretty much every reason already raised.

I actually like KP as a nice balancing factor to the armies. The benefit to having lots of small units in transports means they stay alive longer and can grab more objectives. Downside to that 30-50 point metal box is its a kp for KP missions. I like it. You dont want to give up a bunch of KP's, dont spam razorbacks and chimeras. You want to be able to move and shoot heavy weapons on vehicles while protecting your squad inside, there are consequences.

As far as "this one game I had all this stuff left, and my opponent had only this left but he won on KP, and thats bull crap" kind of chatter I think this is a little rediculous. These type of situations happen in Objective games as well. Ive had games (and Im sure there are others out there who have also had these type of games) where they had more units, lots of heavies or elites left, but no objective, and your opponent had a small squad left in their entire army, but it was on an objective when the game ended.

Its called playing the mission. If I lose my whole army except the one unit and I score 1 more objective than my opponent, I win. If I have my army shot to death but I won on KP then I win. Try something like....starting the units off the board or the transports off the board if they are so easy to kill.

Going into a game knowing KP is 1 of the 3 scenerios, you should have that in the back of your mind when building a list. MSU armies have a huge advantage in the game and KP is one small balancing factor.

Now if you and your friends truly enjoy VP more because it is more indicitive of how the game went, thats fine, play the game the way you want and have fun. In tournaments though, KP should be left in as its 1/3 of the missions and lists should be built accordingly. Its one of the few factors to discourage MSU armies and I think it should be left in, or no one will be playing anything but MSU's and thats kocks alot of the codex' right out of the tourney scene, which is already lacking in diversity.

If you remove KP from the game, then everyone that can play an efficient MSU army (marines, mech IG, DE, Eldar) will win a much higher percentage of the games against horde armies (orks, nids, foot IG) than would otherwise be the case. KP were included in the game to balance the advantage that MSU armies get in objective missions. Its so much better to play with lots of little units that can all score and each shoot at a different target, than an army with only a handful of scoring units that can ony shoot at a few targets, in any game that doesn't include KP.

Regwon wrote:If you remove KP from the game, then everyone that can play an efficient MSU army (marines, mech IG, DE, Eldar) will win a much higher percentage of the games against horde armies (orks, nids, foot IG) than would otherwise be the case. KP were included in the game to balance the advantage that MSU armies get in objective missions. Its so much better to play with lots of little units that can all score and each shoot at a different target, than an army with only a handful of scoring units that can ony shoot at a few targets, in any game that doesn't include KP.

This is exactly the reason KP are better than VP. KP's balance MSU armies against Horde armies.

What about armies that can't effectively play singular LARGE units? Regardless how you play it, you'll end up screwing certain types of armies over.

KP awards armies that feature fewer, but more expensive, units. Marines that don't make use of Combat Squads, armies with tougher transports, IG who blob up.
VP awards armies which build for advantage. I don't know enough army tactics to say for certain on this one what those are, but Eldar is stupidly built like that (Dark Reapers being the most silly example - you'd take the Exarch and only the Exarch if you could).
PV (described earlier) awards armies with functional troop choices. Specifically NOT Eldar

Personally, I think VP is the best option, but not perfect. You could make an amalgamation of KP and VP, I guess. One for one on destroyed model costs, with an additional +X (being a relatively small number) for squads fully destroyed or routed beyond recovery. Or 0/50/100% of unit value, depending on losses compared to game start, so it's easier to count.

Grakmar wrote:I personally prefer Victory Points for the exact reason you outlined. I realize GW wanted to make points scoring simpler (and not math intensive), but I never minded totaling up Victory Points.

The issue isn't totalling up points after the game, its knowing the score as you go. It's bad design to have a scoring system that's so awkward that it's only practical to add things up at the end of play.

Thing is, I want to be able to look at the score, see I'm down 6-8 with two turns to go and plan appropriately. With VPs and similar systems that's not possible.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Lanrak wrote:Hi folks.
There are many ways to determine victory .
KP is a very 'contrived system', that can be abused quite badly.
PV is dependant on the PV being an acurate reflection of the unit worth, and can be seen as a bit fiddely by some.

IF we awarded points on unit rarety not PV value.
Eg
Troop Units = 1 point.

Fast Attack -Heavy Support units =2 points.

Elite units =3 points.

HQ units= 4 points.

It would better reflect the impact of the loss of the unit type on its army.

Its not perfect, but does give a simple and intuitive loading .That allows players to win by tactical targeting of more important units....

What do you folks think?

Confrontation uses a system like that, and to be perfectly frank it's junk and I've never seen a Confrontation player who's happy with it. Simply put, while a single model in an elite unit may be worth more than a grunt, there's generally a lot more troops in the elite unit than in a bigger troops unit. Should a mob of 30 orks be worth 1 kp, while a single Crisis Suit is worth 3? The end result is a system that's at least as unsatisfying as KP, probably more so.

There's merit in the approach of assigning a set points value to units, but it really needs to be taken all the way - they need to assign a point value to whole units. Ork mob - 3 points. Imperial Guard squad - 1 point.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Claypool wrote:This is exactly the reason KP are better than VP. KP's balance MSU armies against Horde armies.

True. Mind you, what surprises me is that GW have opted to balance the strength of MSUs in objective games against the strength of large units in KP games, by having players randomly rolling for one game type or the other after they've built their lists. Surely it would have been much simpler to have at least one default game system to be a hybrid of points of objectives and KPs?

Hi all.
I think the problem is that the codex options allow far to wide a selection of possible units to allow for a 'simple' scoring system.

IF the unit composition is more ridged, it is far easier to achive game ballance, and a reduction in the complexity of the scoring system.

Eg if all unit options were developed to work out at 'about' 100pts, 200pts 300pts 400pts.
Then this could be simply ratioed down to 1,2,3,4, etc.

But as ther is not a definitive method of awarding PV to anything in 40k apart from best guess based on limited playtesting.Any sort of competative scoring system is a bit redundanat.

I would much prefer a random 'mission' deck of cards , with 'minor' and 'major vitory' conditions on each card.

This would negate the need to work out theoretical comparative worth as a measure of victory completley....

TTFN

Thanks for all the great replies. I think I initially liked VPs since it seemed to me that KPs clearly favor smaller, elite armies.

But then Objectives do favor larger, mob-ish armies, and I now see the balance. It's one I dislike, but accept.

KPs are better. I hereby change my stance.

Hmmmm, I prefer Kill Points because it forces a restriction on Guard Players that love to spam their units, at least mostly the tanks, though it is rather annoying when the person has 10+ Guardsmen squads and refuses to blob them.

DakkaDakka wrote: