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How do?

First up, I'd like to clarify I've been out of the 40k loop for some time, so this is based off what I've read online, rather than actual personal experience. So apologies in advance if ive missed anything. But hey, this is just like, my opinion man.

Right, strap yourself in, and beware of waffling.

1. Re-adopt engagement levels from Cityfight. For sake of demonstration, let's all them Alpha, Gamma and Omega engagements. These don't relate to the points values, but army building options. Alpha - strict FoC only, no Lords of War. Gamma - FoC, Gamma Formations, Lords of War. Omega - FoC, all formations, all Lords of War. Just a rough outlining. Gamma Formations would be those where it's a stand alone formation. Omega Formations are those comprised of other formations.

Adds an easy short hand when arranging games. Shops, clubs, FLGS etc could then adopt 'all pick up games Alpha Level only', leaving the 'higher' levels for pre-arranged games.

2. Drop 'no models you lose' from all Missions. From what I can see, that simply encourages the worst sort of power gaming, as certain Codexes offer builds which are too well suited to that.

3. Greater variety of victory conditions within Missions. AoS is doing better here, and as a result it's yet to have any 'Conclave and Knights' equivalents. Provided the players remember you pick your army, then determine mission a wide variety of victory conditions can discourage spam lists - sure it might dominate Mission A, be tricky to beat in Mission B, but have a real uphill struggle in Missions C, D, E and F, and absolutely bugger all chance in Mission G - provided of course the missions are suitably different from each other.

So there you go. Three fairly easy ways to prevent unpleasant pick up games and actively discourage/render too risky spam builds.

I never understood the whole board wiping as a winning mechanism.

In war, wiping out another army does not always signify victory. There may be reinforcements on the way. Your army may be too late to achieve certain victory conditions. There are a lot of variables.

If you wipe your opponent by turn 4, and you cannot achieve enough VP by the game's end (whatever that turn is), then you deserve to lose. It should be easy to rack up VP on an empty board. So if you don't have enough troops left to do it, or not enough mobility to get it done, then too bad. It's the same way in many sports. It doesn't matter how well you do in the last half of the game if you got annihilated in the first half.

Your opponent should get the win because they took care of business and you didn't.

Indeed. But, it's all down to the objectives.

If my job was to say, wreck your fuel lines, thus disrupting your ability to field tanks - that's the important thing. Yes, losing my entire force makes the victory somewhat pyrrhic, but if your fuel lines are ablaze, giving me mechanised dominance of the war zone, it's still a heftier blow to you.

The trick of course is to not simply give the attacker the easier job - and that makes well balanced mission parameters a bit tricksy! But if the attacker has achieved their major objective (assassinate all your characters, blow up your transport or what have you), then at worst they should be able to force a draw, if not a minor victory.

How often are kill points used in missions? I'm getting back into things after a long absence and it seemed like back in the day 80% of the missions we played were about controlling quarters of the table. Missions these days seem a lot more interesting.

I'm just wondering because if kill points were a common and significant source of points you might end up in situations where an army with just a few really tough units might get wiped off the board but they don't net the player who has tons of cheap units enough points to win, even if that player still has a lot of their army left.

What you're saying might still work out for the best, I'm just curious if this would be a common occurrence. Having a wide variety of missions like you mentioned would probably keep it from becoming a problem.

Trouble with Kill Points is that for some armies, they risk giving away far more than they can claim from the enemy.

Consider say, Imperial Guard against Deathwatch.

Yes, a couple of Battle Cannon rounds can spell disaster for Deathwatch there, but if you've already given away more Kill Points than the enemy army even has, you're up against it.

So you need to change up how they're scored. Now that can't be too restrictive - for instance only awarding Kill Points for killing Jump Infanty, as you may have several, and your opponent have none available to their army at all.

Now the exact balance there is beyond your humble scribe here, I can only point hazards!