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Hi All,

Just curious about something here - when 9th dropped my group was really excited about crusade. One of the first things we did was make some armies according to the Crusade rules so we could start up a regular "Crusade" league. As anyone who has seen any of my recent posts knows, my group has put 9th on hold until more of the codexes come out, and the surprise adjustment to power level was just another reason for us to hold off.

My question is - if you are lucky enough to be in a place where you can safely garage hammer, and already had a Crusade league going when the PL adjustment came out - how did you handle it? Ignore it and keep your current PLs, edit your lists according to the new PLs, start over again using the updates?

If you have adjusted to the new PLs, do you feel they're closer to being "balanced" than the old levels?

Well if an event started, then unless everyone agrees, it shoud be run under the same set of rule it had, when it started.

Well, I wasn't in this position - but Crusade forces are generally small enough that you can look at the change for each individual unit and figure out what to do for each player on that basis.
If it's just 1 or 2 PL difference? You might opt to ignore it, or possibly take it out of their next 5PL upgrade. No need to mess with the roster for something like that.

But if they've taken a few units that total up to, say, 10PL extra - that'd be enough to prompt me to discuss with that player and the rest of the group, whether we think that particular force might be a bit overpowered compared to the others.
If it were a fluffy Eldar list, for example, we still might not worry - but if it's Primaris Marines, that player's gonna have an advantage already, so it's only fair their roster is knocked down to bring it within limits to the rest of the group.

Yeah. This is an interesting question, for example, my deathwing terminator squads dropped from 13 to 9!!! for 5 marines, thats almost a third squad for the price of two which is a significant drop!

Personally, we just worked out what the difference in each players army was and let them add extra stuff to that value with any further purchases being at the new values.

Crusade is a narrative system so people should be open to adapting on the fly in the name of better games

Whenever we do any sort of campaign - 40k, AoS, some other game system - the rules that were in place we started the campaign with are locked in until it finishes. Doesn't matter additional what books or errata come along during that period.

I'd try and update, but it depends heavily on your individual situation. If your group is still having fun, reasonably balanced games, the old PLs may work fine for your group.

On the other hand, If you happen to have had, say, a Salamanders player with Long Range Marksmen who abused the old PL numbers hard enough to take a 50PL army that totaled out to 1300 points, (he said without bitterness ) adoption of both the revision and a firm newspaper to the head may be in order.

The thing with Crusade is that it's intended to be an individual campaign - each player runs their own Crusade force, with the ability to play against any other Crusade force in the world. It's not intended to be a balanced "league"-style campaign where everyone has to be on the same footing; it's meant to be about telling a story. (Edit: that said, you absolutely can run a league with Crusade rules - nothing wrong with that!)

It doesn't matter if one player has a more experienced army than another, because the balancing mechanics help to keep things reasonable. Hell, I had my experienced Crusade force get absolutely destroyed by a completely green one, in no small part because of all the extra CPs my opponent got.

Our group ended up agreeing that the PL changes can take you over your supply limit, but you'd have to increase your supplies as quickly as possible to cover your whole OOB - or you can simply remove units as needed.

I ended up not having to do this, since I had enough spare supplies to cover the changes in PL (Chaos didn't change by a lot). At least one of the players opted to completely restart since he wasn't as invested in creating a story, though.

We stuck with the PL numbers that were in effect when we started the Crusade. But then, our first Crusade is almost over and we're about to start a new one with a larger group. Maybe you can figure a way to wrap up the first crusade and start over with the new numbers?

Or is the major concern the fact that the stats and stuff on so many things are going to change when the codexes get released? If that's the case, I'd say stick with pre-Chapter Approved Power Levels until everyone participating has a codex and all go to the new levels at once.

I haven't polled the whole group, but that's what I advocate.

They did say before 9E launched that they planned on adjusting Power after the game dropped. I'd just go with the new numbers myself.

 Cheex wrote:
The thing with Crusade is that it's intended to be an individual campaign - each player runs their own Crusade force, with the ability to play against any other Crusade force in the world. It's not intended to be a balanced "league"-style campaign where everyone has to be on the same footing; it's meant to be about telling a story. (Edit: that said, you absolutely can run a league with Crusade rules - nothing wrong with that!)

It doesn't matter if one player has a more experienced army than another, because the balancing mechanics help to keep things reasonable. Hell, I had my experienced Crusade force get absolutely destroyed by a completely green one, in no small part because of all the extra CPs my opponent got.

Our group ended up agreeing that the PL changes can take you over your supply limit, but you'd have to increase your supplies as quickly as possible to cover your whole OOB - or you can simply remove units as needed.

I ended up not having to do this, since I had enough spare supplies to cover the changes in PL (Chaos didn't change by a lot). At least one of the players opted to completely restart since he wasn't as invested in creating a story, though.

If it came up at my table, I’d go with this. Spend points to catch up ASAP or drop (if you want, not required). Games would be played with the new PL, even if your roster was over supply. If points changed in CA, would you let people use the old ones or would you change to the new ones? I think most people adapt the new points rapidly, I don’t see a reason not to do the same with PL. You don’t want to cripple people’s army, so give them a chance to adapt, but if a unit got a PL hike, it’s probably for a reason.

While my Crusade right now is just vs. my son, keeping up with the current rules lets us head to the FLGS and play a fair game (when able)

I am going to start saving RP before the new codex drops, so I have some extra space for adjustments, new units, or to rearm and reequip. If they change starts (CM, vet intercessors) we might have to talk about how we want to handle that. If it’s just a CP change, that’s easy. If they do more, we’ll see what it is.

 Cheex wrote:
Our group ended up agreeing that the PL changes can take you over your supply limit, but you'd have to increase your supplies as quickly as possible to cover your whole OOB - or you can simply remove units as needed.

This is the most sensible answer. Adjust the PL of the existing units to meet the new PL charts. If you end up at a Supply Limit deficit, spend available Requisition Points on Increase Supply Limit to reach your new Crusade Force PL. If a player is still unable to spend enough RP to increase their Supply Limit to their Crusade Force PL, they can either remove units or have all earned RP spent to increase their supply limit until they reach that point. Unless you have a huge Crusade Force, I can't imagine it taking more than 3 games to get the RP to fix the issue.

I could imagine it being an issue, if your army is over the agreed points and you have to waste RP to make the list legal, while your opponents have armies where their stuff got 1/3 cheaper and they are not only not spending any RP points, but actualy can add more to their armies.
Can be kind of a negative expiriance, specialy considering the type of a setting crusade is.

Karol wrote:
I could imagine it being an issue, if your army is over the agreed points and you have to waste RP to make the list legal, while your opponents have armies where their stuff got 1/3 cheaper and they are not only not spending any RP points, but actualy can add more to their armies.
Can be kind of a negative expiriance, specialy considering the type of a setting crusade is.

On the other hand, if you're heavily affected by it then it means that your army was overpowered/undercosted before the update, which is arguably an even worse experience.

Or is the major concern the fact that the stats and stuff on so many things are going to change when the codexes get released? If that's the case, I'd say stick with pre-Chapter Approved Power Levels until everyone participating has a codex and all go to the new levels at once.

Our major concern as a group was that we felt 9th ed as a whole really wasn't working with the 8th ed codexes so we've set 9th aside for a bit until we see what some of the actual 9th ed books do. Also hoping some of the funkier issues get sorted. We played A LOT of games and started to run into issues that are only now popping up in the tourney data so we feel like this is going to get a bit worse before it gets better.

I was just interested in what other groups did with the Crusade stuff. It's kind of funny because we did discuss holding off on Crusade in case the look at PL and then decided to just go ahead and start because "They never touch PL so why start now" and then BOOM. PL finally got adjusted. We had a pretty good laugh at ourselves for that. The suggestion to let people go over their supply limit but that they must catch up as soon as possible seems to be the best one imo.

Thanks for the thoughts everyone!

We had it pop up in our crusade. I think my SoB order went up like 7 PL. Fortunately, I was sitting on some excess supply and a RP to cover it all. It was a real non-issue for all of us. If someone was grossly over, we'd let them cut units or basically get into supply debt and pay it off.

Fortunately, your totality of crusade cards has 0 bearing on the game. If you have 500 PL because GW quintoupled your points and i have 75... well, I guess we can play anything up to 75 PL. Pick your cards wisely.

Don't recall rules btw but was crusade you use your whole force or were games expected to have PL cap still? So if you have 100 PL worth of stuff but game is 50 PL each that would just give you bigger sideboard?

Would obviously affect things a bit how we would handle. As is we started our crusade league this week so we handled it by starting it after update(and our league has set up game sizes anyway. 1st month 25PL, 2nd month 35PL, 3rd month 45PL. Not sure was that general idea of crusade though in crusade players might agree on it themselves generally?)

tneva82 wrote:
Don't recall rules btw but was crusade you use your whole force or were games expected to have PL cap still? So if you have 100 PL worth of stuff but game is 50 PL each that would just give you bigger sideboard?

Would obviously affect things a bit how we would handle. As is we started our crusade league this week so we handled it by starting it after update(and our league has set up game sizes anyway. 1st month 25PL, 2nd month 35PL, 3rd month 45PL. Not sure was that general idea of crusade though in crusade players might agree on it themselves generally?)

Games are still a equal PL, depending on the mission and what you want to play.

Your crusade roster is just the set of units you can choose from when making your lists.

Don't recall rules btw but was crusade you use your whole force or were games expected to have PL cap still? So if you have 100 PL worth of stuff but game is 50 PL each that would just give you bigger sideboard?

You play at whatever level you and your opponent agree to, so if I have 100PL worth of units, but you have 55, we would play at 55 or lower. The bigger issue is the supply limit. You can't have the total PL exceed whatever your current limit is.

My group came to similar conclusions as others (just let folks go over and they have to increase the limit as soon as possible), so it wasn't a real problem. I was just curious what others did. We're expecting PL to change again when the codexes come out so, like I said, we're taking a little break from 9th.

The way I'd personally handle it is to give folks a one-use "respec" when significant changes happen (across the board PL updates, a new codex, whatever). We're still in the wild west of a largely undefined 9th edition, and locking people in without the capacity to update based on releases is rather bleh. Especially in a deliberately non-hyper competitive format like Crusade.

I would apply the PL changes. As discussed above, there are plenty of ways to make it happen. Some of the power level changes are fairly minor, but some are pretty big swings.

That said, I'd go with the flow. If nobody wants to change, maybe dont' change.

Tycho wrote:
Hi All,

Just curious about something here - when 9th dropped my group was really excited about crusade. One of the first things we did was make some armies according to the Crusade rules so we could start up a regular "Crusade" league. As anyone who has seen any of my recent posts knows, my group has put 9th on hold until more of the codexes come out, and the surprise adjustment to power level was just another reason for us to hold off.

My question is - if you are lucky enough to be in a place where you can safely garage hammer, and already had a Crusade league going when the PL adjustment came out - how did you handle it? Ignore it and keep your current PLs, edit your lists according to the new PLs, start over again using the updates?

If you have adjusted to the new PLs, do you feel they're closer to being "balanced" than the old levels?

I can't say I'd start anything in the first few months of a new edition using said new edition. Now if you started something in 8th Ed just before/as 9th rolled out so you had something to keep you busy while the things in 9th that make you want to bang your head on your desk get worked out, I'd think that was genius. I'd just lock everything in as "end of 8th" nothing changes after the beginning. Obviously Crusade is 9th specific, but the codexes etc are not going to be. I'd lock the campaign into 8th as it was at the end of 8th, as new codexes drop, people still use the old one. As soon as that wraps up, start a new one using the 9th codexes while could/should/would be out by then.