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* I have updated the missions again adding fear the flanks to all 4, I've also implemented crantors suggestion of allowing character lords of war

Points: 1650

Modelling Requirements: All armies must be fully painted and based. WYSIWYG, count as is allowed within reason.

Rounds: 4

Table Size: 6x4
So this is basically a modification of the cap-it-all cup 3 format, slightly less rigid, a little more involved when it comes to missions




Army Composition: 1 Combined Arms Detachment (FOC)

optional:

Any faction may take a single assassin from the officio assassinorium data slate as an elite choice in their foc/combine arms detachment. The model will be treated by all factions as an allie of convenience.
Cypher and Bel'akor are allowed
0-2 Forgeworld 40k units allowed (including characters)
0-1 legacies (marines/chaos vehicle upgrades)
0-1 character lord of war

Forgeworld chapter traits are allowed however as allied detachments are not allowed you are stuck with the one your particular character comes with (if you've got loth, you must use the scoprions trait, issodon you must use the raptors traits and so on)


-no unbound armies
-no allies
-no fortifications
-no formations
-no super heavies (no knights)
-no gargantuan mc's
-no data slates (other than cypher and bel'akor and the relevent portions of officio assassinorium)
-no forge world lists
-no experimental forge world units


Warlord Traits and Warlords: Your warlord trait or traits must be chosen and part of your list. In the event of running a special character with fixed trait, you may opt to choose another trait or keep their existing fixed trait. Your warlord must be designated in your list and it MUST be one of your HQ choices.

Our hope is to open up themed list possibilities. Want to make an army that loves to infiltrate or outflank? Go nuts. Want to make an army who are expert urban fighters? You go girl. Want your warlord to be a total badass with feel no pain? Rock on son.

Scoring:

5pts-------10pts-------15pts-------20pts-------25pts

major loss--minor loss--tie--minor victory--major victory

A minor is 1-4 more vp than your opponent, major is 5 or more vp's than your opponent.



Missions:


Note: We won't be using random game length. Games will go to turn 5. If you're concerned while playing that your game won't get to turn 5, inform a TO. We want all games to get to turn 5 but we understand that with 115 minute rounds it may be difficult for some pairings due to model count or very involved rules (psychic powers).


1 Round One "Watch the Flanks"

Mission: Crusade
Objectives: 5
Deployment: Dawn of War
Secondary Objectives: Slay the Warlord, First Blood, Linebreaker
Mission Special Rules: Reserves, Fear The Flanks

Fear The Flanks

Units arriving from reserve from their board edge or from outflank may assault the turn they arrive.

Note: this has no effect on units in transports without the assault vehicle special rule. Units arriving from deep strike still cannot assault the turn they arrive.





2 Round Two "Situational Awareness"

Mission: Crusade
Objectives: 5
Deployment: Corners (5th ed style)
Secondary Objectives: Slay the Warlord, First Blood, Linebreaker
Mission Special Rules: Night Fight in effect turn one, Reserves, Unlikely Valor: Heavy Support, Fear The Flanks

Unlikely Valor:

In this mission units in the designated force organization slot (elite, fast attack, heavy support) are granted the objective secured special rule. However, troop choices in missions with the unlikely valor special rule lose the objective secured special rule.

Fear The Flanks

Units arriving from reserve from their board edge or from outflank may assault the turn they arrive.

Note: this has no effect on units in transports without the assault vehicle special rule. Units arriving from deep strike still cannot assault the turn they arrive.










3 Round Three "Storm the Line"

Mission: Crusade
Objectives: 4
Deployment: Hammer and Anvil
Secondary Objectives: Slay the Warlord, First Blood, Linebreaker
Mission Special Rules: Reserves, Unlikely Valor: Fast Attack, Fear The Flanks

Unlikely Valor:

In this mission units in the designated force organization slot (elite, fast attack, heavy support) are granted the objective secured special rule.However, troop choices in missions with the unlikely valor special rule lose the objective secured special rule.

Fear The Flanks

Units arriving from reserve from their board edge or from outflank may assault the turn they arrive.

Note: this has no effect on units in transports without the assault vehicle special rule. Units arriving from deep strike still cannot assault the turn they arrive.








4 Round Four "The Violence of Action"

Mission: Crusade
Objectives: 3
Deployment: Corners (5th ed style)
Secondary Objectives: Slay the Warlord, First Blood, Linebreaker
Mission Special Rules: Night Fight in effect turn one, Reserves, Unlikely Valor: Elite, Fear The Flanks

Unlikely Valor:

In this mission units in the designated force organization slot (elite, fast attack, heavy support) are granted the objective secured special rule. However, troop choices in missions with the unlikely valor special rule lose the objective secured special rule.

Fear The Flanks

Units arriving from reserve from their board edge or from outflank may assault the turn they arrive.

Note: this has no effect on units in transports without the assault vehicle special rule. Units arriving from deep strike still cannot assault the turn they arrive.







Corner Deployment: Whoever wins the roll to choose deployment picks 1 of the 4 corners of the board. His opponent must deploy in the opposite corner (diagonally) . (corner = 24x36 inch rectangle). No models may be deployed within 12 inches of the center of the table. Reserves will come in from respective players long table edges. The entirety of player's edges will still be used for determining line breaker.




Terrain:Terrain will be based on the 6th edition terrain rules when it comes to stuff like ruins, primarily to avoid any issues with ruins/assaults and movement. Opponents must define all terrain and be on the same page in terms of how the terrain will interact with various units types and movement. If there is a disagreement, call over a TO. The terrain will be setup prioritizing center weighted los blockers, we don't want gunline to rule the day and we want close combat to have a chance. There will also be an attempt to get some variety of roof to hide under in each quadrant of the board to help balance out barrage.

Wobbly Model Syndrome:Will not be played as an entitlement. Simply put, if your model can't end it's movement without falling over, you cannot end it's movement there. The rule exists to help avoid damaging expensive models, not to avoid common sense or physics.




Prizes:

Best General
Coolest Army
Mostest Funnest Player



As there are no soft scores, you will rate your four opponents at the end of the day from most enjoyable to least enjoyable, don't feel bad as we are forcing this on you. For coolest army, you will vote for the 3 coolest armies at the start of the day. In the event of a tie for generalship, your mostest funnest player rating will be used to break the tie. In the event of both generals having the same sportsmanship, both lists will be taped to rare siberian tigers and we shall have the tigers battle to the death.


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So basically you get your codex, the possibility of taking a single assassin (count as would be really awesome to see here, would be cool to see all sorts of xenos or heretic assassin concepts) access to a couple forge world units, which can greatly expand options without hopefully allowing too much crazy (no guarantees here lol). the option of taking bel'akor or cypher if your faction has access and of course access to a legacy (vehicle upgrade) from the latest marine and chaos fw books.

We avoid too much in the way of allie shenanigans, hopefully allow some weaker codex's to get a few better fw units in the mix, chaos gets a cool psyker, imperials get cypher, everyone gets an assassin if they want and I think it'd be sick to see a all the potential conversions. I'd be kidding myself if I said all assassins are created equal, obviously the culexus is the best choice in terms of effectiveness on the battlefield, but it'd be cool to see like a badass ork grot count as vindicare or some grizzly chaos eversor or like alpha legion callidus. The whole reason for the weird point level (1650) is so people with existing 1500pt lists that they feel work well can maybe try tossing in a fw unit or assassin and give it a try. You're of course under no obligation to do either . With fw character options and bel'akor it is indeed possible to choose psychic powers, so that is always something worth exploring for the armies that have access. Being able to choose warlord trait is also potentially huge for any faction. Some of the brb warlord traits are fantastic and there's a few gems out there in the codex's. I could see guard and maybe even orks having fun with that.

I see this format as a mix of a more classic approach to army building (foc) and a movement away from the more apoc style of army construction. The top codex's certainly don't need formations anyway. Hopefully resulting in a good mix of strong competitive armies with interesting and creative themes without going full apoc. The scenarios are a move away from kill points and maelstrom and a movement towards instilling a heavy focus on taking objectives and final causality over gotta catch'm all pokemon. In addition to the focus on taking objectives, 3 of the 4 scenarios also have entire slots receiving objectives secured. It shakes things up and hopefully incentivizes varied lists.




Anyway, it's a work in progress. I was also considering going totally bonkers and adding another special rule to all 4 missions:

Fear the Flanks

Units arriving from reserve from their board edge or from outflank may assault the turn they arrive.

Note: this has no effect on units in transports without the assault vehicle special rule. Units arriving from deep strike still cannot assault the turn they arrive.

Thoughts?

You know I'm not a fan of the lopsided steaming pile of gak that the 40k rules are currently but I don't think you can run a "no formation/dataslate" tourney very easily nowadays as GW has started to partially (but of course in true GW fashion only do it half assed and only to certain books) relegate whole army lists into formations. The most recent example is Dark Angels with Deathwing and Ravenwing. If you want to run a pure force of one or the other (but not both), you pretty much have to use formations. Even then there are issues. My deathwing army for instance had to move into the normal vanilla marine codex for their 1st company formation to stay legal and not autolose with deepstriking.

My suggestion (which is admittedly flawed) if you want to run a more traditional feeling format is to allow formations and dataslates but that 100% of the force must still fit on a CAD. If the units are in a formation, they must fit in the CAD but don't get the obsec rule or warlord trait reroll when applicable but instead retain their formation bonuses. That way people can still play armies that GW has forced into formations regardless of player consent without allowing too much of the crazy inherent in the formations (since the whole force still has to fit on a single CAD just like before). It's not a perfect solution as it doesn't charge for the rules those units get for free (like for instance free transports or stat buffs) but it stops the stupid 12 elite and FA army combos.

Harlequins have no HQ models...

 warboss wrote:
You know I'm not a fan of the lopsided steaming pile of gak that the 40k rules are currently but I don't think you can run a "no formation/dataslate" tourney very easily nowadays as GW has started to partially (but of course in true GW fashion only do it half assed and only to certain books) relegate whole army lists into formations. The most recent example is Dark Angels with Deathwing and Ravenwing. If you want to run a pure force of one or the other (but not both), you pretty much have to use formations. Even then there are issues. My deathwing army for instance had to move into the normal vanilla marine codex for their 1st company formation to stay legal and not autolose with deepstriking.

Yeah I'll be the first to admit I didn't think it would achieve wide acclaim, but the good news is its likely a small event (5-10 tables). A lot of players alienated by the format would likely be alienated by the painting requirements alone. I do appreciate the point you brought up about dark angels, it's definitely worth noting.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 warboss wrote:
My suggestion (which is admittedly flawed) if you want to run a more traditional feeling format is to allow formations and dataslates but that 100% of the force must still fit on a CAD. If the units are in a formation, they must fit in the CAD but don't get the obsec rule or warlord trait reroll when applicable but instead retain their formation bonuses. That way people can still play armies that GW has forced into formations regardless of player consent without allowing too much of the crazy inherent in the formations (since the whole force still has to fit on a single CAD just like before). It's not a perfect solution as it doesn't charge for the rules those units get for free (like for instance free transports or stat buffs) but it stops the stupid 12 elite and FA army combos.

It's a decent suggestion. but I think we're coming from a "I'm sorry your codex isn't very good or isn't able to function in an foc" perspective ie nothing we do with the format can really balance out the imbalanced codex's. What we may do though in the future is allow an allied detachment but count all allies as allies of convenience to avoid too much buffing/interaction between codex's and to remove the inherent skew towards imperials. It would of course be a blow to theme/fluff because people are already incentivized to take effective units rather than one that may fit an overall theme for the list/army.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

chipstar1 wrote:
Harlequins have no HQ models...

I didn't write their codex sadly.



I'm coming with the assumption that people taking less than stellar codex's will be aware of the up hill battle that awaits them. I won't say this format achieves any more balance, it, like highlander, simply alters balance slightly.

At the end of the day, eldar, marines, crons and even tau still have very strong books. Any buff a formation or super heavy may give a weaker book would only be relevant if we disallowed formations or super heavies or whatever to stronger books. I don't really want to play with all the apoc stuff, and lets be honest, eldar marines and crons in particular do not need formations to field strong lists/units.

As for the pseudo dex's, all I can say is it's not on me that GW releases really bad/small/weak factions that can't stand on their own. If we were to include them, it would be as allied detachments only and even then we'd change the allies matrix so everyone treats everyone else as allies of convenience. Which could be great from a thematic count as perspective, but realistically will just lead to uglier, sillier looking lists with absurd combo's.







I've updated the format

I've updated the format, adding the "fear the flanks" special rule to all 4 missions. I've also added character lords of war to the ok list.

Did anyone have any thoughts on the fear the flanks special rule? Keep in mind in this format any codex could take master of ambush and dole out infiltrate to any non-vehicle units, so in theory the crazy outflanking of doom is available to anyone who wants to go that route.

1650pts test game vs an00bis, we tried out the 4th mission from the tournament format we're working on. 3 objectives with normal secondaries, troops lose os but elite slots gain os and everyone can assault out of reserve and outflank (just not deep strike). An00bis's new assassin is terrifying, he stalked tigerius and blew his brains out, mine managed to off a riptide before jason's assassin put mine in the ground (omg I think we just forged a narrative :lol: ) We both rocked some fw stuff, I had a deimos vindicator tank destroyer and jason had a unit of tetras and a barracuda.








Mission: