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Hey all,

I come from WFB and since the death of that game have been looking in vain for a new competitive game to play. My small group was pretty active in the mid-west in the tournaments for WFB and we really enjoyed them for the most part (good time away from the family, cavorting around with friends). Anyways, after having looked, realizing the Age of Sigmar game will probably never be able to sustain a quality tournament scene, I am seriously considering 40k. I am resolved to try a few 40k tournaments, but thus far I have not been able to convince my friends to join me.

My friends believe the 40k tournament scene is overflowing with NPE (negative play experience) jerks who play nothing but screamerstar or eldar jetbike warlock star garbage that is impossible to do anything against. They believe with formations the Meta is far too difficult to plan against all possible OP combinations and that the only way to be competitive is to join the ass holes and play the OP BS.

I am looking for some feedback from folks who play in the tournament scene, particularly in the midwest. Is it really this bad? Should I not even bother unless I am going to play Eldar or Something similar?

Or is it closer to the WFB scene? Where you might get 1 bad game out of 5 or so, and sometimes no bad games at all. Is there enough counter play spread across most of the armies that there is a decent amount of variety?

I am just curious, also any tips or advice on convincing my friends to try out the competitive scene would be great, thanks.

Arch

I left 40k for 8th ed warhammer tourneys because I found 40k to be the vastly inferior game for competitive play back in 5th edition. It was... very different to fantasy back then and I believe it has only moved further away from any sort of competitive nature since.

Honestly if you liked 8th ed fantasy tourneys I'd suggest you look at taking your fantasy army and using it for Kings of War, the rules for which were written by the same guy who wrote 8th after he left GW. Warmachine and Infinity are both also great tourney games.

That might not be what you want to hear but GW have quite simply done everything they can to make both games super casual and now that AoS hit neither are really good, or even average, tourney games.

Kings of War is more akin to 7th Fantasy than 8th, or so I've heard.

40k's meta has changed. Anyone who says 5th was the best competitive edition obviously played either Blood Angel metal boxes, Grey Knights, or Necrons. Today, it's anyone who plays a Scatter Bike list, Marine Gladius, Daemons, Tau (once their book drops), Decurion Necrons...

I meant that 40k seems to have gotten worse not for which army is on top or anything, but that under 5th you simply removed models, under 6th and 7th you have to measure out which model is in the front and have to remove him first, meaning you need to slow down to measure who is in front, roll saves one by one in some cases, and then hide unit leaders and special weapons in the middle of units so they aren't lost first.

That kind of crap just makes the new editions seem worse for competitive play to me.

 Crazyterran wrote:


40k's meta has changed. Anyone who says 5th was the best competitive edition obviously played either Blood Angel metal boxes, Grey Knights, or Necrons.

Or you know, maybe because it was a relatively good balanced ruleset...

I never played any of those armies, so bang goes that little theory.

From my limited experience of late, tournaments in 40k are visibly divided into tiers of player success, mostly determined by book and list. The top end players, who either move codex a lot or who maintain a huge collection of one faction, tend to be the same people fairly consistently, which suggests that player skill does play some role. Then there is a fairly sharp dropoff as you hit people more inclined towards attractive armies than top tables, which includes people like myself who stick to one (uncompetitive) army regardless. The bottom tables are, you know, bad armies piloted by younger players usually.

Anyway, this is all pretty much the same as I saw in WFB 8th tournaments, where my Tomb Kings would spent a lot of time hanging out with other Tomb King armies in the bottom pairings, but my High Elves mysteriously were mid-tables. The two games - 8th and 40k - are kind of the same, in that comp packs are usually used only to neuter the very worst offenders, and never give a leg-up to the weaker armies; also it is roughly the same proportion of player skill and army choice determining, with player skill including a bit more of the list comp for 40k.

What is considerably worse in 40k is the scale of the difference. I mean, I could conceivably draw or win against the full WoC cheese with my Tomb Kings, though it was really hard to achieve; but my Orks have essentially no chance against a tricked out Necron decurion. I just don't do enough damage to achieve anything. So that is a negative for 40k, and will preclude any non-optimised (or cheese, or whatever pejorative term you prefer) list from entering top tables. You also get Allies, which mainly means that Imperial players bring models from a half-dozen books and it is super confusing to play against. But balancing this out, I will say that 40k tournaments nevertheless manage to be quite fun for me; a little more than WFB, the attendees (below the top tables) tend to be just keen on blowing stuff up and having fun, which means that in practice I've enjoyed my games even when my ladz are incapable of penetrating the rankings to any great degree.

I hope that this fairly rambling and anecdotal experience from the Scottish tournament scene helps!

 Charles Rampant wrote:
From my limited experience of late, tournaments in 40k are visibly divided into tiers of player success, mostly determined by book and list. The top end players, who either move codex a lot or who maintain a huge collection of one faction, tend to be the same people fairly consistently, which suggests that player skill does play some role. Then there is a fairly sharp dropoff as you hit people more inclined towards attractive armies than top tables, which includes people like myself who stick to one (uncompetitive) army regardless. The bottom tables are, you know, bad armies piloted by younger players usually.

Anyway, this is all pretty much the same as I saw in WFB 8th tournaments, where my Tomb Kings would spent a lot of time hanging out with other Tomb King armies in the bottom pairings, but my High Elves mysteriously were mid-tables. The two games - 8th and 40k - are kind of the same, in that comp packs are usually used only to neuter the very worst offenders, and never give a leg-up to the weaker armies; also it is roughly the same proportion of player skill and army choice determining, with player skill including a bit more of the list comp for 40k.

What is considerably worse in 40k is the scale of the difference. I mean, I could conceivably draw or win against the full WoC cheese with my Tomb Kings, though it was really hard to achieve; but my Orks have essentially no chance against a tricked out Necron decurion. I just don't do enough damage to achieve anything. So that is a negative for 40k, and will preclude any non-optimised (or cheese, or whatever pejorative term you prefer) list from entering top tables. You also get Allies, which mainly means that Imperial players bring models from a half-dozen books and it is super confusing to play against. But balancing this out, I will say that 40k tournaments nevertheless manage to be quite fun for me; a little more than WFB, the attendees (below the top tables) tend to be just keen on blowing stuff up and having fun, which means that in practice I've enjoyed my games even when my ladz are incapable of penetrating the rankings to any great degree.

I hope that this fairly rambling and anecdotal experience from the Scottish tournament scene helps!

Actually your post has been the most helpful thus far! Thank you!

Do you find that the difficulty introduced by the complexity of Allies is something that can be overcome with more practice or is it just too much for any one person to handle?

For instance, by the death of 8th, I had a good understanding of the core rules for all the armies except Chaos Dwarves, Dogs of War, and Brettonia. I feel like I knew enough about each army that if 8th had allies like 40k, I would have been ok in that arena. Is the 40k Allies scene worse than what it would have been in 8th if 8th had allies? Or not?

Thanks for any input!

Uhm, well most Space Marines are kind of the same thing, only with different guns or special rules, so that helps. And Guardsmen are agressively vanilla, so their stuff is easy to learn. The weirder stuff - AdMech - has hit while I've not been playing much, so I'm really out of scope on that.

In general: 40k has way more stuff in it. More books, more weapon types, more special rules. Then you get allies, so that someone (usually Imperial players, since Xenos get crappy allies outside of the Eldar love-fest) can turn up with some Blood Angels in drop pods, a platoon of Imperial Guard, an Assassin, and an Imperial Knight, making use of four codices at once. In practice you don't often see things quite that outlandish, but a combination of two armies at once is really common.

How hard all of this is to learn is another question. I mean, a marine is a marine. I always found Space Marines allied with Space Marines, from two separate chapters, to be the most annoyingly confusing since it is hard to remember which squad has what special rule. But usually Imperial factions stick to rulebook USRs, other than Admech.