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Whether im playing or watching a battlereport i always feel like objectives that require you to just destroy a specific type of unit or destroy any unit under specific circumstances detract from tactical depth in the game. You are already encouraged to focus fire on certain targets, and dont need the game to reward you with victory points for doing something that already contributes to the likelyhood of your victory. This is especially true for Slay the Warlord and his twin brother, Kingslayer. The fact that the enemy warlord generally has one or more special ability buffs is motivation enough to remove it. Things like big game hunter also only have you going after something you wanted to get rid of anyway. As for First Strike/Blood, this bonus objective might actually distract some fire to something less important, but it also discourages taking units with low staying power if you werent going to spam them anyway.
And the biggest problem with kill objectives in my experience is that it only favors shooting-heavy armies in a game where castling up and hosing down your enemy before they can do the same to you is already the meta.

Instead i think missions should emphasize taking objective markers and getting Linebreaker or Behind Enemy Lines more, and force gunline armies to spread out and move forward, risk having to deal with the move and shoot penalty for heavy weapons, not bunch into their special character's to hit/wound buff aura for maximum fire output.

Unfortunately, being dead also prevents you from scoring those objectives. Crazy firepower needs reigned in mechanically, not through objective shuffling.

I tend to agree, I used to enjoy the take and hold missions and similar in older versions of the game over the kill as many units as you can missions. It would be interesting to play a game where no victory points at all were awarded for kills and solely for holding objectives and the like. If the only victory conditions were to get behind enemy lines you might end up with both armies spending the battle running past each other to get to the opposite side of the table and not having much of a battle at all though!!

Perhaps if killing objectives were still in place but instead of killing large monsters and warlords etc, the only units to score victory points when killed were the less powerful ones like supporting characters, troops and transports. Players would have to make interesting tactical decisions - do I focus my fire on the big scary threat to take it off the table, but it won't score me any points; or do I take out the scoring units that aren't a huge threat, but risk being wiped out by the monsters and warlord. Combined with objective markers, this could make an interesting scenario.

Firepower should only be extremely effective when you’ve positioned the right gun to shoot the right target in the right location I.e shooting assault cannons or ordnance weapons at exposed infantry with zero cover. Most weapons just tend to work decent under any situation. Scatter lasers for example have a high enough strength and put out enough shots to hurt anything from infantry to vehicles.

Aash wrote:

Perhaps if killing objectives were still in place but instead of killing large monsters and warlords etc, the only units to score victory points when killed were the less powerful ones like supporting characters, troops and transports. Players would have to make interesting tactical decisions - do I focus my fire on the big scary threat to take it off the table, but it won't score me any points; or do I take out the scoring units that aren't a huge threat, but risk being wiped out by the monsters and warlord. Combined with objective markers, this could make an interesting scenario.

I'd worry that this would just turn certain troops into even more of a liability/tax than they currently are.

Wyldhunt wrote:

Aash wrote:

Perhaps if killing objectives were still in place but instead of killing large monsters and warlords etc, the only units to score victory points when killed were the less powerful ones like supporting characters, troops and transports. Players would have to make interesting tactical decisions - do I focus my fire on the big scary threat to take it off the table, but it won't score me any points; or do I take out the scoring units that aren't a huge threat, but risk being wiped out by the monsters and warlord. Combined with objective markers, this could make an interesting scenario.

I'd worry that this would just turn certain troops into even more of a liability/tax than they currently are.

Yeah, that's true, balancing it would be difficult. I like the idea in theory, but it might not translate well to the tabletop. might give it a try in some casual games and see how it goes. Personally I Would prefer to see more troops in general on the tabletop and that they should make up the bulk of an army in 90% of cases, but that isn't how the current rule-set works, and most mechanics to encourage troops have the feeling of a tax in my experience, but i'm in danger of wandering off-topic, so I'll stop now.