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I'm just getting back into 40k after a 15 year absence (didn't play a lot of games back then too) and I feel like I'm failing to understand why people would want to play with these random objective cards & so forth.
Why not just play to table your opponent or contest objectives that scale upwards in value towards the centre of the board? When you randomly assign objective values or draw random objective cards it just feels like it's flipping a coin to see who wins while shooting each other. Please tell me if I'm missing something here, but if I'm killing more of your troops than you are mine, but you get lucky and draw some objective cards that get you a bunch of VP's then I lose the game at the end? Does that really feel like a victory for the winner or defeat for the loser? Does it really involve that much tactics if that's how games are played? Having some randomness to the game is great (i.e.. dice rolling), but this just seems rock, paper, scissors to see who wins.
I know I don't have to play this way, but just curious how this became the concept of the game and why people got behind it. Some of the scenarios seem cool to me, like attack & defend and capture the relic, but the random objective cards..?

Well for one wars are rarely won by just killing stuff so "I kill your stuff but you concentrated on objectives" is actually good thing...

It also force you to think on your feet which is always good while encouraging mobile armies which is also good. Anything that discourages static gunlines can only lead to a better game.

And as any student of military knows no plan survives enemy with plenty of cases of changed orders during the battle.

And of course elements are needed to combat the 100% unrealistic god view players have. Players can't be in 100% control for it to feel like real battle as in reality commanders don't have 100% control.

Well if we look historically we find tht sometimes, holding a position is the most important thing, or recovering something, or rescuing somebody. The randomness "illustrates" the nature of combat, no plan survives contact with the enemy, etc.

That being said, I come from the old school Table or Die school myself. One thing it does is "force" manuever to the board, one has to be very confident if one is going to have their army sit back and camp out...

Playing to table your opponent is the most boring type of play that one can play, really.

The "the game is a big battle in the middle!" are normally because the only objetive is to kill your opponent.

My favourite type of play is capturing points. 3 points, the one with more at the end of the battle wins. That way you need to divide your forces, you can move a unit from one side to support other, etc... much more tactic that "Just roll to the middel and see who kill more"

Other is the "King of the hill" with 2-3 contested points, winning VP at the end of each turn for the player that is in possesion of that capture-point.

Normally I agree with Galas on most of his points.
Here I will point out a problem with objectives game play.

And the OP version of play is how the vast vast vast players from 2nd edition and on that I play with ONLY want to play.

In 2nd edition there was 'strategy cards'. They lended to such a lopsided gameplay at times they were deemed optional.

Later, you would have much more tournament varied Scenarios.

The Problem with all of these random things is you build your army that you enjoy to play....perhaps a line army of guard or a flying army of DE.
Then you get a mission to hold a fortress or run accros the battlefield to the other side!~

Yes I know orders and battles change what a force is asked to do....but not every army is created equal and not every army is going to be able to do things as well as others.

So many of those situations make for a very very unfair game.

You may counter that you need to make a better balanced list. If that is the case why don't we all play a provided army by the event organizers or by the FLGS or whatever and forget about building our favorite type of forces? Really that is what the extreme end of this line of thought.

Telling the 10 squads of guardsmen to run across the field and get as many units over half strength across is stupid and no commander would do that in a no mans land.

Telling the Hive mind to hold the hill with an army of all guants while the Marines sit back and unload with everything till bug hill is toast is not very fun to play either.

I hate random psychic powers too. Why would I bring a psyker with Machine curse to fight Tyranids? Why would I bring an Inquisitor with anti Demon powers to fight orks????

If I am sending in forces to do a job, I would think that except in most unlikely of situations that I would send in the units that would have some success!


Automatically Appended Next Post:
What objectives SHOULD be is a chart....that if THIS army is fighting THAT army then there are a group of fair objectives that match those 2 armies at battle.

So Nids vs orks would have accesss to x, y and z scenarios

but Nids vs Guard would use s, t and v scenarios/objectives

while Eldar vs Guard would use a, b, an v scenarios.

Then the scenarios/objectives would take into account of the army lists and the other nuances to make a fairer gameplay and battle experience.

Thanks from agreeing with my points!

But, I haven't talk about random objetives? I was talking about set objetives/capture points in the battlefield beforehand.

But I think the difference is that we don't play random objetives or random battleplans. We always select a battleplan before doing our lists.
And I don't play in tournaments.

 Galas wrote:
Playing to table your opponent is the most boring type of play that one can play, really.

The "the game is a big battle in the middle!" are normally because the only objetive is to kill your opponent.

My favourite type of play is capturing points. 3 points, the one with more at the end of the battle wins. That way you need to divide your forces, you can move a unit from one side to support other, etc... much more tactic that "Just roll to the middel and see who kill more"

Other is the "King of the hill" with 2-3 contested points, winning VP at the end of each turn for the player that is in possesion of that capture-point.

Yeah I can totally get behind 'most Objective Points wins', but don't you think drawing random Objective cards during the game can at times make it drastically unfair for one player. So really the outcome of the game didn't come down to that player's army list or tactics, but rather the draw of a card?
I like objectives, but only when they're reasonably fair and don't make the game completely up to chance to see who wins.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

tneva82 wrote:
Well for one wars are rarely won by just killing stuff so "I kill your stuff but you concentrated on objectives" is actually good thing...

It also force you to think on your feet which is always good while encouraging mobile armies which is also good. Anything that discourages static gunlines can only lead to a better game.

And as any student of military knows no plan survives enemy with plenty of cases of changed orders during the battle.

And of course elements are needed to combat the 100% unrealistic god view players have. Players can't be in 100% control for it to feel like real battle as in reality commanders don't have 100% control.

I agree, but I think the dice rolling represents the unpredictability of battle enough without the random objectives cards. Objectives themselves I don't have an issue with, just when it gets to the point of so much random that it negates the whole point of playing a tactical war-game itself, because at that point it's almost like you have no effect on the outcome.

I can recommend the matched play scenarios from the AoS General's handbook. They are good, varied and make sense.

I think the way GW envisions this is army creation after objective selection. that and players to agree that if something just won't give a good game, to re-roll.

In an ideal world you'd have a few differant pre-genned lists for basic scenerios. one for a "hold the line" type scenerio. one for a "Fast moving objective cap scenerio etc

Haven't had a chance to check out the new maelstrom of war cards, but I didn't really like them in 7th. It's a neat idea, that in reality just slows the game down and doesn't usually add much depth just more randomness. I'm a huge fan of the more regular objectives used in other missions though.

Totally random objectives is what I hated the most about 7th.... and here they are in 8th.

Take that hill, go back to that other, kill that unit, take hill A again, and again, now go to the other corner of the town and capture Building B...It doesn't make sense at all.

It's way better than "kill them all".

Killing is very rarely an objective in real life. Just means to an end.

The maelstrom objectives are one way to balance 7th edition. Ever tried an eternal war mission against Necrons? The only way to fight some of the terrible overpowered lists is with maelstrom(at least, if you don't have an overpowered Codex yourself). Agreed, it's rather random, but in 7th edition everything was rather random, that's why there weren't really tactics involved. With the mission cards at least you had something to think about.
The new stratagems and mission rules seem to be a new approach to add some depth to the game which I'm really excited about.

Because eternal war missions are boring. They work better in tournaments, but in friendly games cards are much more fun

Just playing to kill everything is a terrible way to play 40k, IMO. There's more to a game than just trying to table your opponent and having other objectives makes the game more interesting.

The randomness of the Maelstrom objectives has literally never been a problem for me and I've used them over 100s of 7th edition games. Yes, sometimes you get ones that are impossible but the discard mechanic works well enough to get around that and using the objectives tends to lead to more rounded armies as people realise pure gunlines (for example) are poorly equipped to win these types of games.

Well, my personal answer is very simple - they add variety and choice of game style. Eternal War and Maelstrom both exist in 7th (now in 8th we also have Crucible of War) - no one is taking away pre-plannable missions or opportunity to play "to table".

This added value of variety is best seen in cotext though - I've played 150+ games of 7th ed, 100+ of them with a single opponent (2-4 games in a row almost every weekend for a year), using only two factions (or five, depending on what exactly you call a faction). We started with Eternal War scenarios, but after two dozen games they start becoming both repetetive and solvable up front, so we switched to Maelstrom and never turned back (we did however expanded the idea further and played most of those games with custom set of objectives).

Eternal War in a small enviroment tend to devolve in terms of selectable units and valid strategies, and this is not something we wanted, because we like a lot more models that were optimal in 7th ed. "Stock" Maelstrom may be unfair at times, but it does deliver a lot of challenges if you want to play as optimal game as possible (and being awarded a win after doing everything perfectly is not a necessity for you), because every turn is different, and you cannot really pre-plan anything, you have to adapt and react.

Wich of course may not suit many players out there, especially if one plays less than a dozen games a year and expects predictability and/or pre-planning possibilities.

 benlac wrote:

 Galas wrote:
Playing to table your opponent is the most boring type of play that one can play, really.

The "the game is a big battle in the middle!" are normally because the only objetive is to kill your opponent.

My favourite type of play is capturing points. 3 points, the one with more at the end of the battle wins. That way you need to divide your forces, you can move a unit from one side to support other, etc... much more tactic that "Just roll to the middel and see who kill more"

Other is the "King of the hill" with 2-3 contested points, winning VP at the end of each turn for the player that is in possesion of that capture-point.

Yeah I can totally get behind 'most Objective Points wins', but don't you think drawing random Objective cards during the game can at times make it drastically unfair for one player. So really the outcome of the game didn't come down to that player's army list or tactics, but rather the draw of a card?
I like objectives, but only when they're reasonably fair and don't make the game completely up to chance to see who wins.

I don't think I have explain myself. I wasn't talking about random objetive cards. I was talking about "There are 3 objetives in the battlefield. You gain 1 VP for everyone that you possess at the end of every turn" Or just seeing who owns the capture-points at the end of the battle. FOr example. "I have 5 models in this point and you 0. So is mine. The other two are contested. So I win a minor victory 1-0"

Random VP are bad because they take scoring away from the player.

"I killed your Rhino...1 VP"
"I killed your Rhino...3 VP. I win. I such good strategist."

Then there's the "unwinnable objectives." I'm sure you know what I mean things like "Manifest a Psychic Power" when playing Necrons or "slay an enemy transport" vs Tyranids.

"Me am no good strategist."

Strictly speaking, 40k should just have *one* deployment, one scenario, and primary/secondary/tertiary objectives, balanced to favor annihilation and controlling the map. Otherwise you end up with messes like The Relic or 4e "Eldar Tankshock you off objectives with Holofalcons".

There are armies better at each type of play. Some armies excel at the random objectives, some at taking and holding for long periods, others at digging in and still others at sniping things at the end of a game. I enjoy the way most UK tournaments run it at the moment. You play a combination of Maelstrom and Eternal war in each mission, so an army that can achieve both does well and an army that can achieve one and deny the other does well. All the d3 and d6 VP rewards are removed and replaced with d3=2 d6=3.

I prefer the dynamic battlefield. it also helps for interesting narrative battles. you draw a card and get to role play to justify. can be as simple as "da boss said he saw something shiny over ere and we is gonna get it" for orks or " the farseer has forseen this to be an important point for us to hold for the moment, stand vigilant" for Eldar, or even " we detect possible remains of an stc reading at this location, take at all costs" for the mechanicum. then the say d3 points being how valuable what was found there to be.

honestly I personally have no desire to play non maelstrom mission and will only result to non maelstrom missions if no opponent wants to do one. I also don't attend tournaments or non apocalypse events that are not using objective cards.

I always loved the random physical objectives in theory, but in actual game play it just became something else to keep track and/or forget.

The random "mission objective" cards on the other hand are great fun, and help change up the boring 'annihilation' type game.

 MagicJuggler wrote:
Random VP are bad because they take scoring away from the player.

"I killed your Rhino...1 VP"
"I killed your Rhino...3 VP. I win. I such good strategist."

Then there's the "unwinnable objectives." I'm sure you know what I mean things like "Manifest a Psychic Power" when playing Necrons or "slay an enemy transport" vs Tyranids.

"Me am no good strategist."

Strictly speaking, 40k should just have *one* deployment, one scenario, and primary/secondary/tertiary objectives, balanced to favor annihilation and controlling the map. Otherwise you end up with messes like The Relic or 4e "Eldar Tankshock you off objectives with Holofalcons".

I'm leaning towards adapting a Malifaux-like objective system to 40k as an alternative game mode. Objectives would be something more than "sit on this for 1 round," more like "have 2 units in the enemy deployment zone at the end of the game" or "hold a building on the centerline of the map"

You would have one large objective that both sides share, and then a collective pool of 4 objectives of which you choose 2 that your army wants to do. Enemy also chooses 2. Could be the same as yours, could be different.

The way they do it in Malifaux tends to give very tactical play, without having to necessitate exact mirror plays that one army is evidently going to be better at than the other.

Another option worth considering (for a narrative context), is keeping the core "control the map/destroy your opponent" scenario, and using the Malifaux "custom objectives" system as a "sidequest" mechanism where completing them gives you assorted rewards (replenishing some spent Command Points, replenishing some damaged minis, forcing morale checks on foes, etc).

As for "objective" play, I'm working on a core rewrite based on alternating activations, and like the idea of objectives being "weighted" (more VP for controlling objectives near your opponent's deployment, more VP for controlling "contiguous" groups of objectives, more VP for taking the center, etc). Basically, objectives victory should be about taking and holding the battlefield and effecting a breakthrough that can be exploited, rather than becoming a game of "rocket tag" like 7e games could turn into.

 MagicJuggler wrote:

Then there's the "unwinnable objectives." I'm sure you know what I mean things like "Manifest a Psychic Power" when playing Necrons or "slay an enemy transport" vs Tyranids.

Everyone I have played with when doing random objective cards, if the objective was impossible to achieve then its discarded and the next one is drawn.

I like the idea of random objectives but like everything else GW did with 6th and 7th it was poorly implemented. I think they should be something you pick to draft like say maybe 10-15 objectives when you build your army. This way when you draw a random objective it is more geared toward your armies design. If your army is assault based then you can pick the objectives that require to kill certain things, get in enemy deployment zone, kill stuff in the fight phase, etc. Right now the objectives would need to be adjusted for a system like this to work properly but would eliminate the drawing a useless objective problem and would also add another level of strategy.

 Talamare wrote:

 MagicJuggler wrote:

Then there's the "unwinnable objectives." I'm sure you know what I mean things like "Manifest a Psychic Power" when playing Necrons or "slay an enemy transport" vs Tyranids.

Everyone I have played with when doing random objective cards, if the objective was impossible to achieve then its discarded and the next one is drawn.

Likewise. I haven't looked through 8e Maelstrom objectives in detail so am holding off saying similar things about them, but the fact that this was such a common houserule was telling about the system as a whole. Now? You get to spend a CP to redraw.

Either way, the "random" aspect of it is not going to be balanced by itself. Getting "Destroy a Vehicle" will have different difficulty to pull off depending on if your foe is running Venomspam, versus running 3 Baneblades

 Talamare wrote:

 MagicJuggler wrote:

Then there's the "unwinnable objectives." I'm sure you know what I mean things like "Manifest a Psychic Power" when playing Necrons or "slay an enemy transport" vs Tyranids.

Everyone I have played with when doing random objective cards, if the objective was impossible to achieve then its discarded and the next one is drawn.

yea, that rule is a must. my club does. if no psyche, flyer, heavy support etc then redraw

some opponents even like the redraw duplicates which I am on board with

What I like about Random objectives is that it keeps the game dynamic. I hate the "last turn objective grab" style game and kill points are very unbalanced.

That being said, I don't think they're optimal. What I'd like to see is objectives worth 1 point at the end of each turn you control them, a series of things like slay the warlord, monster hunter, etc that can each be scored once per game and then giving 2 or 3 vps for holding objectives at the end of the game.

 docdoom77 wrote:
What I like about Random objectives is that it keeps the game dynamic. I hate the "last turn objective grab" style game and kill points are very unbalanced.

I agree.

A dynamic game is more fun to me.

And randomness is fun, if it's done right.

I hope I never see ObSec Jetbikes leaping onto objectives on the last turn. Or, superfriends deathstars kill points games. Yuck.

 benlac wrote:
I'm just getting back into 40k after a 15 year absence (didn't play a lot of games back then too) and I feel like I'm failing to understand why people would want to play with these random objective cards & so forth.
Why not just play to table your opponent or contest objectives that scale upwards in value towards the centre of the board? When you randomly assign objective values or draw random objective cards it just feels like it's flipping a coin to see who wins while shooting each other. Please tell me if I'm missing something here, but if I'm killing more of your troops than you are mine, but you get lucky and draw some objective cards that get you a bunch of VP's then I lose the game at the end? Does that really feel like a victory for the winner or defeat for the loser? Does it really involve that much tactics if that's how games are played? Having some randomness to the game is great (i.e.. dice rolling), but this just seems rock, paper, scissors to see who wins.
I know I don't have to play this way, but just curious how this became the concept of the game and why people got behind it. Some of the scenarios seem cool to me, like attack & defend and capture the relic, but the random objective cards..?

Armies like orks or DE, which I both play, don't have the slightest chance to table any possible decent opponent. I hate playing KPs for examples, MSU armies are too penalized.