Kdash wrote:

Spoiler:

So, my thoughts…
Secondaries in ITC are an issue, though I think the main issue is that there is usually a big advantage to build your list to a) deny your opponent secondaries, and b) setup your list to focus on at least 2 secondaries with multiple options for reliably achieving a 3rd based on your opponent. This therefore means that it becomes a game of list building and secondary scoring, opposed to a game about the actual, primary, mission.
That for me doesn’t help balance in any shape or form and comes down to it being a matchup between those that understand ITC list building and (I feel) the majority that do not. Hence why the entire Brohammer team took exactly the same list to the LVO.

Unfortunately, the only real way for ITC to get around this problem is to scrap secondaries entirely, or, have them randomly decided at the start of each game.

You still have the issue of being able to pre-build your list to do well in x amount of primary missions, but, I feel that this is an area where GW is ahead of the ITC, in that the way that their primaries are scored is sufficiently (or close to) different mission to mission to deny 1 list from being able to stomp through all of them without issue or matchup concern.

I’ve not played the new Maelstrom missions yet, but, some of the most intense competitive games I’ve played have been where the ET missions have been combined with the Maelstrom missions. Now that the issue of randomness has been reduced due to the new deck building rules, I feel like this should be something to go back and look at. It also adds an additional level of list building and planning skill to each player, as they’ll have to decide on whether to double down on the ET mission, or, work on a way to cover off both missions whilst being strong enough to compete.

Now, I include myself in this next comment, but I think it needs to be said.
People enjoy ITC because they know what is going to happen and know what their list can do even in hard counter situations. They might not be able to win, but, they’ll know how to score points to aid their overall placing.
People are scared to move away from this, because the vast majority of people aren’t skilled enough to adapt mid game to score points if something throws a spanner into the works. We’d all rather blame bad dice or “imbalance” for our losses, rather than the idea that our list couldn’t handle a small bit of randomness. Which is also why I personally think some level of randomness SHOULD be strived for in the competitive scene. Independent and quick thinking should be way more valuable than netlisting and practicing with the list a dozen times.

For me, you should win the battle on the day on the tabletop due to skill and decision making, regardless of what random things happen in the game, not 4 weeks beforehand when you build your list.

For those wanting some data on competitive CA19 events, we are unfortunately lacking right now, simply because most stats collators blank any event not on BCP, or not running 2000 points (which includes the GW heats and finals). I get that it can be hard to collect the data, and specifically the lists, but, even when that is known some events just get instantly dismissed because they are run at 1750 points or simply “aren’t ITC”. This isn’t going to change imo.
With that in mind, below is some of the info from the Caledonian event and the GW finals.
Caledonian Uprising –
Top 10
Thousand Sons & un-aligned Daemons soup.
Forces of the Hive Mind.
CSM & Nurgle soup.
Imperial Fists.
Raven Guard & Imperial Fists.
Iron Hands (Astraeus & Repulsors).
GSC.
Blood Angels.
Iron Hands.
Orks.
Full lists can be found here - https://tabletop.to/caledonian-uprising-2020

GW Finals –
Top 10
Iron Hands.
T’au.
Grey Knights & Guard & BA.
Imperial Fists.
Drukhari.
Blood Angels.
Iron Hands.
Orks.
Chaos Soup.
Harlequins.
It is worth noting here, that outside of the 2 placings I’ve listed as soup, I am unable to confirm if the other lists souped or not.
Final standings can be found as pictures on the Warhammer World Events Facebook page.

Now, if we count the GK/Guard/BA list as Marines, we see that over the 2 events, 50% of the top 10’s were Space Marine lists. Whilst this is still higher than we’d all like to see, we can already see the difference between “competitive” diversity between this format and the ITC format. We 100% need more data, but, as both of these events were attended by a lot of the best players in the country, inc some that performed very well at the LVO this year, we can potentially start to draw a bit of information from the results and at least begin to wonder what the possibilities could be.

The final comment I’d like to make is in response to “soft scores” someone mentioned a few pages back. Personally, I think soft scores should remain outside of “best general” rankings. Maybe you can have a separate ranking at the event which includes it, but, it should not affect the rankings on “who played best”. Like it or not, you’re more likely to get awarded a “best game” vote in games where you get absolutely destroyed, than in games where you handily win, unless you are an exceptional person to game with.

ITC has been a fantastic pillar for the scene to stand on and grow from, and the circuit will remain so, regardless of what happens. However, I feel that their format is nearing its end as a requirement now that GW is offering a viable alternative.

Dudeface wrote:
I don't think they're the ones missing the point. Best overall isn't just battle points, that should be best general. The nice guy who nearly came first absolutely should get rewarded with best overall.

Dudeface wrote:
Any system with a score can be gamed, that's just the way it is and I agree it needs to be scored independently. Maybe "best overall" needs to vanish and just have best painted, sportsman, general etc?

bananathug wrote:
But how do you determine who is the highest ranked player when you have 8 guys that went 1-1 with the same round scores in a 50 person tournament? Or 5th place between all the 4-1 players?

The big tournaments have max scores per round of 30-40 points so that there is such a small chance of 10 dudes winning their games with 14 out of 18 points.

I didn't get it at first and took a couple posters to explain it to me but without a wide range of scores the GW missions just are not practical to run a tournament and determine parings and in some cases a winner without a larger range of potential scores (which means secondaries which means homebrew).

Besides, I still find the CA 2019 missions pretty boring when compared to something like the newest adepticon mission pack

edit: you would have to remove all faction specific cards from deck building to have anything that resembled a "fair" game when using maelstrom decks.

Spoletta wrote:
You need a lot of stuff at the same time, so obviusly you cannot just take more firepower and be happy, it will not work against a good player. Especially because tabling an opponent doesn't guarantee that you win.
I have been to CA tournaments were the winner was tabled in more than half his games, i tabled him too, and yet he won all his games.

nareik wrote:
Obviously the player is a common element here, and CA 2019 isn’t. I suppose one could argue ITC is less ork friendly than either iteration of CA?

 vict0988 wrote:
Considering I have been actively avoiding EW I find it strange that I had one of the few games I played decided by objectives floating in my direction

and another game decided by having 15 units against a 5 unit list and in a mission about getting VP for each unit destroyed.

Now, you can say Knights aren't TAC,

Imperial Fists aren't TAC, BA aren't TAC and end up with such a narrow definition of TAC that you basically have to dictate lists to the players attending your tournament, that's not what I am interested in.

I want list and faction diversity and fairly matched games. You can't craft a mission set that incentivises TAC enough that people will wholly ignore the game design GW has implemented which massively favours skew lists.

That means more games decided by which mission you happen to be playing when against BA vs when against Orks vs when against Craftworlds.

 vict0988 wrote:
#2 https://tabletop.to/caledonian-uprising-2020/list/james-mackenzie No vehicles or monsters, only 3W and 1W Infantry.

The skew vs TAC thing is kind of complicated because they aren't really opposites. TAC is a term of offensive output, you can build a Knight army that is good vs Knights, one that is good vs Marines or one that is good vs Orks by taking high S medium AP, high AP and high ROF weapons respectively. Those would be counter lists, which is the actual opposite of a TAC list, a TAC list would just be a Knight list that is equally good against Orks, Marines and Knights.

A skew list is mostly in terms of defensive profiles, as other posters have explained you can create a list that can ignore lascannons by not taking any good targets, that's a skew list. The opposite of that isn't exactly TAC, it's more like get destroyed by all comers list since skew is generally effective against TAC because the TAC list will have some weapons that are ineffective against your skew list.

It's not about being able to win, it's about the mission not creating an unfair advantage to any player in any specific game. Overall both EW and Champions advantages certain armies and lists, that is inevitable. The question is whether an Imperial Fist player would prefer fighting certain opponents in certain missions and what happens when they do vs when they don't. GW missions have in the past given massive advantages to one player over the other based on lists, minimizing the amount of impact the player choices have in the game due to huge impacts from an individual mission being in you or your opponent's favour.

No, I am saying GW wants skew lists with the rules set in the codexes and supplements, no mission set is going to remove that. I personally don't want what GW wants. I want rainbow or highlander-like lists which is why I think internal balance is important.

You don't have any missions you'd prefer to play vs BA jump spam and maybe another one you'd prefer against IF flyer spam? That seems incredible to me.

 vict0988 wrote:
It is skewed towards infantry with 1 or 3 wounds, any weapons that are designed to kill anything different will be weak against the list. Haywire cannons, lascannons, meltaguns, all designed to take out vehicles, particularly heavily armoured ones and all relatively weak against Warriors.

It might not be a counter list though, it might not be built to take out any specific list or build, but it you have to notice the lack of vehicles and monsters.

It's a skew list because the Monsters are all characters with less than 10 wounds if the list included Magnus or a Bloodthirster I would not call it a skew list. Again, haywire, lascannons and meltaguns are useless until you get rid of all the chaff.

Sorry but I have not played against the Possessed bomb so I am not familiar with how it operates, I also believe there are several ways to field the bomb depending on which mark they take. The Crawlers do present a target for a type of weapon that would be worse against Possessed, if the player had instead brought three units of Havocs his list would not have any vehicles to target with haywire weapons for example and the list would be more skewed.

Trasvi wrote:
Rocking a plaguebearer horde[...]
.
Hordes work because most armies can't afford to load up on the amount of firepower it takes to kill 150 plaguebearers

200 boyz or 300 gretchen AND possibly have a chance at killing Marines.

Trasvi wrote:
Ork hordes are still doing great. Take 3 shokk attack guns, a squad of tank bustas then fill the remaining points with boyz and gretchin.

ERJAK wrote:
Except they're really not. The mission is always 'stand on more objectives than you opponent' with a miniscule, usually irrelevant, twist and objective placement, when they're deliberately set to be mirrored, or deployed by two players who are at least minimally competent, is largely irrelevant.

Ewar missions may not be actually identical, but they're functionally identical in terms of how you go about winning them.

Yoyoyo wrote:
Missions don't need to be balanced for every single faction in the game, there just needs to be a way for players to avoid obviously one-sided matchups.

 AnomanderRake wrote:

Yoyoyo wrote:
...rather than forcing a player to take a flexible force because they need to play potentially 4/6 missions.

The more unpredictable the mission, the less you can overspecialize. That's arguably a good thing within reason. Though I'm of course interested in the counter-argument.

In an RTS factions have the ability to play in a different fashion to adapt to the map. In 40k if you take the wrong list build, or in extreme cases the wrong faction, when you started buying and painting expensive toy soldiers months or years before the event, and then get screwed over by the mission, there's very little you can do.

The ease and lack of cost of switching factions in an RTS makes this feel like a screwey comparison to me.

Spoletta wrote:
And less bags to carry! It is becoming increasingly difficult to carry around 2000 points of nids!

Martel732 wrote:
Rts you can scout your foe and counterbuild. Changes everything.

 Ishagu wrote:
This is a tabletop wargame, not an RTS video game.

Starcraft has far less units and only 3 factions so there's only so much comparison you can make. Also, in 40k you don't build up the armies during the game so the system of competition is fundamentally different.

Martel732 wrote:
Starcraft also has the power of metadata and map design. Its just more uniform.

 Inquisitor Lord Katherine wrote:

Jidmah wrote:
We have been randomly determining our missions after bringing finished lists to our gaming group since a few months into 8th. Not once has a single player been screwed over by any of the eternal war or maelstrom missions because of his faction or because of his collection.
The only times this happens is when people bring an army that can't adapt to the mission - like one-trick combos, static gun castles or lists heavily skewed towards one aspect. Or armies that wouldn't work in any mission, obviously.

I can think of a great many maelstrom games that have been won or lost by the mission. Maelstrom missions are literally the worst kind of mission, they're a race to the top with a fixed number of available points that appear randomly. Score points the turn they're generated, or lose. Games used to come down to one player having seen "Demolitions" [almost always outright impossible] while another saw "Kill an enemy unit, kill 3 for d3, kill 6 for 3+d3 VP" [basically trivial].

There were some factions that just couldn't score some objectives, like Harness the Warp. Some objectives are essentially impossible, like the one to hold every objective on the board [which is only possible at a point where your enemy is probably tabled].

In theory, you have an equal odds of seeing an impossible card as your opponent, but in practice that's terrible for a competitive best-of-one game, because it's a sentiment that's only applicable when averaged over a large number of games.

 Blndmage wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:
You get 5 cards and pick 3 out of those.
You can eliminate pretty much all that are difficult or highly improbably to do, plus you get to keep the cards you don't play for later turns, so you can set up some that take a bit more work over multiple turns.
On top of that, one of the three objectives is face down, so you can bait your opponent into giving it to you through his own actions.
In addition, there are three new stratagems that help you out when you hit a dry spell.

From experience, you usually miss no more than one or two objectives across the game(usually during T1), meaning that you usually draw 15 of your 18 cards in a 5 turn game. If it goes to turn six, you'll have drawn all of the cards you picked, meaning both players have had a chance to score all the easy vp and the "super-objectives".

I really like the idea of this, never looked at Malestrom before, but as a Necron player, we've got no "super objective", and I feel like most of ours aren't even that thematic.

 Kommisar wrote:
I’m in the middle of a 4 month long league that uses slightly modified maelstrom missions. There are about 20 of us and the general consensus is that most people are not fans of the cards at this point. Most of the specific army tactical objectives are pretty bad and then there’s this gem:

16 - Power of the Cabal
Score 1 VP (to a max of six VP) for every two psychic powers you have successfully manifested at the end of the turn.

I tabled my opponent but he was able to use this 3 times and beat me on points, which in our league was still close enough to be a tie at least.

I don’t necessarily hate the idea of maelstrom but I do think the cards and scoring needs to be looked at again.

Martel732 wrote:
I"m not talking tabling. I"m talking about killing everything within 24" of the lockdown objectives. Having crap hiding in the back doesn't help at all because there is no engineer secondary in lockdown. So yes, killing the PROPER UNITS always works. Dead units can't score.

And in lockdown in particular, its easy for gunlines to target the proper units.

Martel732 wrote:
I don't think you know that. I can't find any real data to support that.

 Smirrors wrote:
I had a 3 round tournie this weekend with new ITC. It seems fine. Easier to score bonus and the secondaries feel more balanced. No seize was ok as people felt more settled with their deployment decisions. Overall consensus was positive and the common themes was refinement.

As for people complaining about ITC being boring, for competitive tournaments its not meant to be super interesting. If you are like me and you only play ITC at tournaments say once a month, its fine. Obviously people like to practice for tournies so it only makes sense that you have the repetition outside of tournies makes it feel boring over time. Isnt it the whole point of practicing for ITC tournies?

There are plenty of other times to play casual hammer and CA missions. Over time I am sure some TOs will want to run CA based tournies if the demand is there for it. People should just speak to their local TO rather than complain on the internet.

 Sim-Life wrote:
People who haven't played CA missions claiming that they're too random. There's like one mission with an element of randomness because objectives disappear. Which again was a scenario Warmachine's Steamroller packet had when it was at its peak. So if WMH can have a random element in a scenario and be considered THE wargame for competitive/tournament play why is it so bad when 40k does it?

 Inquisitor Lord Katherine wrote:
It is too random.

 Inquisitor Lord Katherine wrote:
create a barrier line [32/2.54+2]*5=16.29" long that can only be passed by FLY or driven around.

you just can't win after turn 2 or 3, because even if you table the enemy there aren't enough points left for you to reasonably score to win.

My basic vision of this mission's play that I've gathered from playing it twice is that it basically comes down to having units that can be in the middle of the board earlier than the enemy [infiltrate>vanguard>gate/jump/interceptor shunt] and is effectively over on turn 3 because of disappearing objectives. I've not faced a SM opponent yet in that mission to prove that assertion, but I imagine with 2 squads of infiltrators [pretty standard for my SW list, and a bunch of other SM lists I face often] there'd be nowhere to interceptor shunt too, and the infiltrators could just walk/advance up to form their 16.29" lines of do-not-pass [they're also troops, so it'd be even easier to obsec away objectives near to the enemy deploy edge]. There's only one recourse: have units that FLY, can score, and can kill troops in assault, and not have them get focused by an army T1 because I know that they're your only chance of winning the game.