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How do you guys feel about playing competitive 40k with the new 9th edition rules and deployment as opposed to old ITC, for whoever has played it.

For those who don't know:

ITC: The attacker places all of their models, then the defender places all of their models. There is no seizing and objectives are scored at the end of the battle round.

9th Edition: Players alternate placing models starting with the attacker. Both players declare their reinforcements at the start. Whoever gets first turn is rolled off after deployment. Also, no seizing.


Personally, I feel like going first is always a big deal, and at least with ITC you knew you were going second and could counter deploy to minimize losses. Also, with primary objectives scored at the end of the battle round instead of during each player's command phase, you always had a chance going 2nd to steal objectives. In 9th, the person going first always has two turns before the second player scores, and they can do a lot of damage before you score.

I feel that 40k is not very suited to competitive play.

Long time ITC member, here:
I liked knowing to go first or second and being to deploy as such at 8e's premature covid ending. That was great. Going back to alternating deployment and then a dice off for first turn has always been a one of the game's sucking aspects.

After a bit of time, whether big events go as planned, like SoCal Open, I might lean on the ITC leadership about bringing it back.

Heck, *if* the local league starts up, I'm going to fly it with them or at least every opponent.

ITC deployment with no uncertainty was quicker, but incredibly dumb from a competitive 2 gameplay perspective.

The only way it could’ve worked was with a (non-optional) seize (perhaps even on a 5+) to discourage attackers from just putting everything on the line and the defender from just hiding.

Alternating deployment like 9th (or early 8th) has the most tactical depth, but can be slow.

It also favours alpha striking and favours going first.

Unsurprisingly so far in 9th ed first turn has been even bigger impact than before. Unsurprising seeing GW dropped all the anti-1st turn deciding things it had made. Especially CA19 missions were much better in that. On that 9th ed is huge backstep.

For what claims to aim for balanced game weird step to make things more imbalanced.

cjmate8 wrote:
9th Edition: Players alternate placing models starting with the attacker. Both players declare their reinforcements at the start. Whoever gets first turn is rolled off after deployment. Also, no seizing.

Surely alternating models is going to take an age to deploy? Wouldn't it be better to alternate deploying units instead?

I'd argue that the importance of going first or second should be based on how much you are prepared to pay:

Roll a dice, highest decides whether they want to go first or second, and how many CP they are prepared to give up for that. That may be 0 cp if they aren't that bothered, or higher if they are.

The other person can then choose to outbid if they wish to take that side, and then alternate further bids until one person passes. The winner then pays their bid but not the loser.

If going 1st (or 2nd) is important to you then you pay what both sides felt it was worth.

Whether that is before or after deployment is an open question.

After a half dozen games of 9th, it appears clear that going second is many times the best choice,

The first one tipically kills very few models during his turn, due to range and LoS issues, but can move first over the objectives. The player going second hits the opponent much much harder during first turn, but has to chase after the objectives and has a slight disadvantage on turn 5.

Spoletta wrote:
After a half dozen games of 9th, it appears clear that going second is many times the best choice,

The first one tipically kills very few models during his turn, due to range and LoS issues, but can move first over the objectives. The player going second hits the opponent much much harder during first turn, but has to chase after the objectives and has a slight disadvantage on turn 5.

Bingo. This is only false if a deployment zone has been left so sparse on obscuring that the first turn player can deliver a hammer blow while also grabbing Objectives.

If going second was many times the best choice, I don't think we'd be seeing a ~58% win rate for going first. At the very least, I think we can say there is a definite first-turn bias the way people are currently playing the game. Presumably Brandt would say that first-turn advantage will disappear once people know how to play the new game better, and we'll see if that's true. But the stats at the moment are showing very clearly that first-turn advantage is a real thing the way people are playing right now.

yukishiro1 wrote:
If going second was many times the best choice, I don't think we'd be seeing a ~58% win rate for going first. At the very least, I think we can say there is a definite first-turn bias the way people are currently playing the game. Presumably Brandt would say that first-turn advantage will disappear once people know how to play the new game better, and we'll see if that's true. But the stats at the moment are showing very clearly that first-turn advantage is a real thing the way people are playing right now.

I think terrain is important as well. The only data we have so far under analysis exempted due to incompleteness the event that was showing an opposite trend with sufficiently in-DZ terrain. We're operating with a lot of incomplete data and a lot of resistance to change.

I wouldn't say the data WILL change. I'd simply say we need to give it time. This is especially true with the game's balance efforts being done around the EW/GT packs.

That's fair. There definitely isn't enough data yet at this point. I hope the gap does diminish; I think we can all agree a 58% win rate for going first isn't something we want to see.

It seems that the reason for the first turn win rate has a lot less to do with the alpha strike and more to do with getting board control (and the objectives).

Currently going first only advantages armies that are highly mobile and/or durable, on tables that have proper terrain coverage.

If you do not have proper terrain coverage, going first overly favors first strike shooting armies.


I personally am in favor of FDFA (Full Deploy For Attacker). Defender gets to pick his deployment zone and counter deploy but goes second.

This means the attacker, who is going first has a huge advantage in board presence, but is likely to get hit much harder in response.

Statistics can also be really wonky. How does the first turn win rate correlate with the faction win rates? With such a small data set, it is easy for the numbers to get skewed by luck of the dice.

It is also interesting that Goonhammer saw a definite different in win rates by scenario. Maybe some scenarios are easier to win when going first while others when going second? Is there a different between even and odd objective scenarios? Or just more objectives versus less?

There is so much to unpack before saying, going first has the advantage, full stop.

Goonhammer put up all its math and methodology, you can check into it as much as you want. It looked pretty solid to me. There's enough data on the main point of whether going first is advantageous to say that it is (as the game was played at these events, anyway) with a very high degree of certainty. It might not be 58%, it might be 56% or 60%, but the chance of the first-turn win rate being 50% and this just being a massive coincidence because the best players happened to win the roll-off more often is pretty much nil.

Methodology, but not the raw data. Here's an example of what I am asking:

There can be a 60% chance of going first meaning you win. It can also be true that playing Faction A means you have a 60% chance of winning.
But how often is Faction A winning when it goes first?
And how many of the games played did Faction A go first in?

I ask because in a small sample size, you expect any specific variable to be off the average. If Faction A went first 45% of the time, its 60% win ratio is actually in opposition to the 60% win ratio for going first.

Ask the saying goes, "Lies, damned lies, and statistics".

Again, the probability of that being the case has already been worked into the statistics.

They found a first-turn win disparity with a 99% certainty rate. That builds in the possibility that better players went first more often, or that better factions went first more often, or any other chance-based variable. There is less than a 1% chance that the first-turn win rate is 50% and these results are just a statistical anomaly.

Now if Salamanders had a rule that meant they could reroll their roll to go first you would have a point. But they don't. The best factions have no greater chance to go first than the worst ones. So it all gets rolled into the standard deviation calculation.

yukishiro1 wrote:
Goonhammer put up all its math and methodology, you can check into it as much as you want. It looked pretty solid to me. There's enough data on the main point of whether going first is advantageous to say that it is (as the game was played at these events, anyway) with a very high degree of certainty. It might not be 58%, it might be 56% or 60%, but the chance of the first-turn win rate being 50% and this just being a massive coincidence because the best players happened to win the roll-off more often is pretty much nil.

But is that better or worse than previous rule sets (whether any of the previous ITC iterations, ETC-style, etc..).

It's missing context.

60% is great, if previously it was 80% or 30% win-rate going first.

60% is worse, if it was previously 50% perfectly balanced.

What's the baseline?

No such data exists.

8th edition mostly had no data at all, since it was split in so many formats that pretty much all data sources were polluted and unapplicable.

By the way, I disagree with the method of that analysis.
Win rate for who goes first doesn't actually matter. Win rate for who wins the roll instead is quite an important parameter.

And then there is controlling for faction win rate not to mention Go First vs Go Second win rate by faction . Statistics is rabbit hole of data that has to be carefully analyzed to avoid getting the wrong conclusions, especially over small or highly variable data sets.

Still, I think Goonhammer did a pretty decent job with the data they had for a quick analysis.

Going first is massive advantage in 9E because a lot of the matchups in competitive are between mirrored archetypes. (Basically, who can dominate the midboard with their elite infantry.) Throw in top of the round scoring, and it's not surprising the first-turn win rate is so high.

I think they should bring back ITC deployment. It's faster, and honestly, the "more tactical" argument is pretty thin because aside from a few key models, we all know where the other units are going to go. Given how game time is the biggest problem in competitive 40K, the best of both worlds is to make redeployment a generic stratagem.

Guy posted something i agree with on reddit completely for competitive events.


Since first turn is so strong currently we need to change how you aquire it.


You should now have to, instead of roll off, bid CP for first turn.

If going first is worth it to you, bid more CP.

Whoever wins the bid, gets first turn with no roll, but looses that much CP. This will be a very good equalizer and make skilled players who are better at managing their own CP end up winning more.

First turn has always been an advantage, but it's a much smaller advantage in 9th than it is in 8th ITC.

Biggest advantage of going first in 9th is that you deploy your reserves first.
With the smaller board, it happens quite frequently that the second player has no good places to put his reserves.

Probably the only change I would like to see is for the second player to be given the choice to immediately deploy (with normal deployment) some units that he had put in reserves after rolling for who goes first.

Spoletta wrote:
Biggest advantage of going first in 9th is that you deploy your reserves first.
With the smaller board, it happens quite frequently that the second player has no good places to put his reserves.

Probably the only change I would like to see is for the second player to be given the choice to immediately deploy (with normal deployment) some units that he had put in reserves after rolling for who goes first.

Or go back to the old board size. Shrinking the table is dumb

I'm not a tourney player but I feel that the new deployment style is inferior. I much prefered the all at once style of deploying as it was much quicker.