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 Vaktathi wrote:
At the 6E events I've attended so far, I found the majority of flyers being included were there either because they were abuseable (necron airshows, vendettas, etc) or provide some sort of defense against said abuseable flyers, not really because most people found them "cool" or whatnot.

I've yet to see the Ork or Dark Eldar flyers at any event yet, nor really any of those offered via Imperial Armor when allowed, aside from one blight drone.

That, to me at least, implies a problem.

I like the idea of flyers, however their execution in 6th edition has been very poor, and ultimately the ones you end up seeing are those that fulfill the role of battle tanks (but are much harder to destroy and have a great deal of mitigation to the HP system 6th added that makes vehicles so fragile), or those that are good at fighting other flyers, or both.

While tournaments are ultimately, tournaments and you go to bring the best stuff and fight the toughest battles, a no-flyer tournament would be interesting to attend just to see how much that changes the game without them.

Really? We have seen every flyer represented at our tournaments, including FMC.

If you ban flyers you'll just be returning to 5th and GK will be ruining everyone's day again. Put a max on fliers, I would say 4 or 5 max at 1750+ is good. Or just play 1500 with no restrictions.

nkelsch wrote:

jdjamesdean@mail.com wrote:
Lets face it, it's a tournament. It's meant to be competitive. Telling someone they can't use their legal army is a slap in the face. Almost every army can use allies, so therefore everyone in a way has access to anti-flyer/flyers of their own.

Adapt and overcome, or be left in the dust of the past.

Except for the codexes which can't adapt and overcome to due gross imbalance and unbalanced and unfair allies matrix... Those codexes are already in the dust of the path with 2-edition old codexes.

Telling someone you beat them with 'skill' in a 'competitive game' in such a fundamentally broken gaming system like 40k is a slap in the face to a lot of people.

Which armies are those?

Eldar? Oddly enough it can still be a competitive codex. Tau, same story. It's showing its age and they both struggle a bit more than they did in 5th.

Chaos Daemons is pretty old itself...

Orks, still going strong.

The adapt and overcome is more of a player mentality thing than an actual ingame piece but w/e.

To me when someone would say no flyers allowed would be a slap in the face. If someone doesn't want to play 6th ed. By all means go play in "your" friends basement. Times change, rules change. Deal with it or lose. It's competitive for a reason.

Enable FW, spam Hyperios air defence launchers and see demons and fliers destroyed during their own movement phase, they also work very well against MEQ and AV. We had one tourny with these allowed and afterwards a big kick off in the uk on TWF that the next tourny was interceptor units 0-1. Funny that.

Flyers are here to stay, for better or worse outside of a friendly game nothing should be banned

There is nothing wrong with imposing restrictions, either for balance of enjoyment reasons. Lots of games ban or limit normaly legal parts of the game for competitive events. Moba games with their character bans, MTG has an extensive heap of ban configurations.

The way warhammer is balanced leaves a lot to be desired. The fact bans and restrictions on army composition are so rare probably has more to do with the difficulty of determining a baseline and continual power creep than the quality of codex writing and release schedule.

The first GW warhammer tournaments had some pretty major restrictions on characters and magic in particular. After we saw that format in WD we pretty much never went back to the raw configuaration.

Working on the assumtion that GW rules are balanced and fair is unwise. If you want to alter them however make sure you know exactly what you are hoping to achieve with your changes and that they are what the players want to play.

If you want to pull fliers from the game, then lets pull Jaws and Paladins out too, since people get annoyed by those and they completely bulldose some armies. In fact, why not toss both the SW and GK books entirely?

Slippery slopes and all that.....

Grey Templar wrote:

If you do this, its no longer Warhammer. Its "HowIthinkthegameshouldbeplayedhammer"

You just described the majority of tournaments actually.

Most have arbitrary limits, requirements and rules addendums...

jdjamesdean@mail.com wrote:

nkelsch wrote:

jdjamesdean@mail.com wrote:
Lets face it, it's a tournament. It's meant to be competitive. Telling someone they can't use their legal army is a slap in the face. Almost every army can use allies, so therefore everyone in a way has access to anti-flyer/flyers of their own.

Adapt and overcome, or be left in the dust of the past.

Except for the codexes which can't adapt and overcome to due gross imbalance and unbalanced and unfair allies matrix... Those codexes are already in the dust of the path with 2-edition old codexes.

Telling someone you beat them with 'skill' in a 'competitive game' in such a fundamentally broken gaming system like 40k is a slap in the face to a lot of people.

Which armies are those?

Eldar? Oddly enough it can still be a competitive codex. Tau, same story. It's showing its age and they both struggle a bit more than they did in 5th.

Chaos Daemons is pretty old itself...

Orks, still going strong.

The adapt and overcome is more of a player mentality thing than an actual ingame piece but w/e.

To me when someone would say no flyers allowed would be a slap in the face. If someone doesn't want to play 6th ed. By all means go play in "your" friends basement. Times change, rules change. Deal with it or lose. It's competitive for a reason.

Sure some of the codexes can 'get by' but they take more player skill to do so and it is on average harder to do... And their useful allies due to no battle brothers and their quality of flyers and anti air is suspect. I can't see why it is fair for someone to get a BS 4 ADL for the same price another gets a BS2 ADL.

You can say that you prefer a specific 'meta' of the game and it is 'good enough' for no one to be default auto-lose, but to say it is fair and people's complaints should be summarily dismissed is also the wrong attitude as well. The fact that people have to 'struggle' at all to make these armies work shows they are overcosted, lack flexibility and are out of balance with newer, easier to play armies which have un-paid for advantages like the new allies combos and fortifications simply being statistically better.

I think it is fine for a group of people to change the META of an event to try to include more people, especially people who can't go buy a 6th edition super optimized GT army. Local events usually have more unoptimized armies than what you see at NOVA or Adepticon. If you have a few people kicking teeth in, thne alternative is people stop playing in the events. I feel like narrative play and organized gaming instead of a 'tourney' which makes people's attitudes change due to intense reading of the dictionary may help out.

 CT GAMER wrote:

Grey Templar wrote:

If you do this, its no longer Warhammer. Its "HowIthinkthegameshouldbeplayedhammer"

You just described the majority of tournaments actually.

Most have arbitrary limits, requirements and rules addendums...

Such as?

I have found the tournaments I attend to only have rules clarifications for things GW has neglected in their FAQs. I have never encountered "arbitrary limits, requirements, and rules addendum". I have encountered arbitrary and poorly designed scenarios that have skewed a tournament toward a specific army build, book etc but scenarios aren't any of the things you mentioned.

Isn't the REAL problem that GW didn't release counters to fliers?
How hard would it have been to do a micro update to every army to include some kind of AA wargear?
I mean, FFS, that's just oversight on a MAJOR level.
Either that, or pure unadulterated greed.

Where was all this concern trolling when JotWW made about one third of the armies out there unplayable? Suck it up and adapt. Oh, and stop running scenarios that fall too far out of line with the book ones, because the whole "chose your own 40k Victory Conditions Adventure" style of scenario is what is allowing flyer spam armies to be so annoying.

 OverwatchCNC wrote:

 CT GAMER wrote:

Grey Templar wrote:

If you do this, its no longer Warhammer. Its "HowIthinkthegameshouldbeplayedhammer"

You just described the majority of tournaments actually.

Most have arbitrary limits, requirements and rules addendums...

Such as?

I have found the tournaments I attend to only have rules clarifications for things GW has neglected in their FAQs. I have never encountered "arbitrary limits, requirements, and rules addendum". I have encountered arbitrary and poorly designed scenarios that have skewed a tournament toward a specific army build, book etc but scenarios aren't any of the things you mentioned.

The NOVA Open removed the second force org at 2000 points. (I believe they officially worded as something like a 1999 point tournament, but you could be 1 point over.) In addition, the only fortifications allowed were the ADL and Bastion.

Heck, if you use special/custom missions you're deviating from the core game. It's incredibly easy to turn the game into

"HowIthinkthegameshouldbeplayedhammer".

It's so easy to deviate that it strikes me as borderline ridiculous to even bring such an idea up. I've played the core rules twice. The first time was the first game of 6th ed I played with a buddy, and we just wanted to see what the full rules were like. The second was a random pick up game. I can understand wanting to play a full core game for a random pick up, but tournaments are organized events... not random pick up games.

 Phazael wrote:
Suck it up and adapt.

Which for most people turns this into 'moneyhammer' because unlike a video game where you can use skill and different options to adapt to a tactic, you have to possibly buy an entire new army or change codexes to 'suck it up and adapt.'

So as people grow into 6th edition, what good does it do to run a tourney at a store, where 80% of the people can't afford to buy new armies or are slowly adapting to 6th edition through upgrades and army changes and one person who dropped 800$ to flyerspam is kicking everyone's teeth in for months? This isn't people complaining about attending a GT where the expectation is everyone participating is literally spending hundreds of dollars just to attend, this is for events where the reality is, someone with money and a meta list can insta-win the event due to the imbalance of the core rule-set and the limitations on the playerbases local ability to change.

There is nothing wrong with acknowledging reality.

At the risk of getting flamed...

I think an occasional tournament putting severe restrictions on the FOC or on certain types of units would be very enjoyable, especially as part of a series. You could come up with some (BUILD THE NARRATIVE) reason as to why these types of units couldn't be allowed for each game of a tournament series... the trick would be to make sure that the restrictions impacted everyone... if not equally, then at least significantly at some point in the series.

For example, I might propose in a 3 tournament series...

- no flyers
- no ground vehicles
- "troop units" must (by point value) make up half your army

It would force each participant to think outside the box in their army construction and come up with non-standard ways of competing. Sure, some of these restrictions will hurt some armies more than others, but over the series things should equal out. The final game (i.e. championship tourney) could be invite only to the top players of each primary round (or the best aggregate scores... whatever) and have no restrictions. That way the finals are decided on an open playing field but everyone has had an opportunity to experiment with something new.

I think the above would be boatloads of fun. The various restrictions should see a variety of armies rise to the top in the qualifying games, while the unrestricted finals will allow everyone to field whatever they'd like.

I don't have a problem with altering the game for fun, but banning something just because you think its unfair is wrong IMO.

I would play a special tournament series like Gitsplitta mentioned because it would be really fun. Its also not something thats directed at one particular person so its more fair overall.


Then again, there may be 2 types of tournaments. There is the purely competitive tournament, which most would fall into IMO. This is the tournament where there should be no alterations to the game. Play like you've got a pair, no whiners allowed, balls to the wall and that sort of thing.

The second type is a for fun tournament. Real casual. just the sort of thing where you pay $5-10 entry fee and the winner gets a gift card or something.

I like both types equally. But I hate a major tournament(like 20+ people) trying to pretend its the friendly for fun tournament.

If you are getting people from all over, it should be a competitive tournament without Comp.


So unless something is totally breaking the game(such as a FoR messing up pre-setup terrain) it shouldn't be altered.

Why not allow people to "sideboard?"
Let people bring up to 1k pts (your tournament, your points limit) to change their army composition to be (more) optimal against opponents.
You'll have to allow a good amount of time for people to substitute between matches but I think that would allow people to possibly play the best game possible against whatever opponent.
It's bad enough that we have to deal with the "dice gods."
The sideboard will have to follow all other rules the tourney has imposed as well as be fully disclosed as part of the list.
Any easy way to implement this (ridiculous?) idea is to allow each play to bring X amount of points of models and allow them to build a list of Y amount of points from that pool of models.
Hell, its your tourney, your group of players and we're just fictional hand puppets you'll probably never meet giving you our ideas, use/abuse what you will and let us know what you choose and how the players liked it.

 Gitsplitta wrote:

For example, I might propose in a 3 tournament series...

- no flyers
- no ground vehicles
- "troop units" must (by point value) make up half your army

I quite like this idea, in fact, with the right group of gamers, I think it could be done in a single tournament. 3 different lists, and each round uses one of these different restrictions. That would be a very interesting tournament. No ground vehicles and 50% troops is probably a bit too much for the casual gamer to make a 1500 point army from their collection of miniatures, but something close to that could work very well. Thanks for the idea!

 OverwatchCNC wrote:

Grey Templar wrote:

Most have arbitrary limits, requirements and rules addendums...

Such as?

I have found the tournaments I attend to only have rules clarifications for things GW has neglected in their FAQs. I have never encountered "arbitrary limits, requirements, and rules addendum". I have encountered arbitrary and poorly designed scenarios that have skewed a tournament toward a specific army build, book etc but scenarios aren't any of the things you mentioned.

Well, in my opinion, as soon as a time limit per round is enforced (usually 1.5 hours for most tournaments), it restricts any type of footslogging horde army, as you won't be getting 5 turns in a regular game due to time involved in model placement and movement, and that's usually without any rules debates. We were joking at the last tournament that many of us may spend too much effort playtesting our army lists if we don't try to finish a game in under an hour. Also, any tournament that doesn't have a good collection of terrain for every table (which is most of them), also restricts some army types. Again, playtesting an army is different at home with a nice collection of scenery than the actual tournament when you get 2-3 bases of ruins and a hill or two.

are flyers really that overpowered......my land raider savaged one up the other day......a few 6's soon sorts the men from the boys lol

TL-BS1 is almost exactly the same as straight BS2.

Twin-linking really helps against flyers.

so there we go then.......honestly sometimes we all need to breathe a bit and remember its just a game.........

Although looking at IA Aeronautica the Sabre Weapons battery.the Hyperios Air Defence battery, the Helical Targeting array on the mortis Contemptor and the Whirlwind Hyperios I 100% wouldn't be worried attending a game that allowed items from the book...some of those things are just wrong I tell you ...lol

 Alpharius wrote:
Sounds OK to me.

I'd think a 'no Allies' tournament would also sound good too.

I would support this and the No Flyers rule.

You know... (and this has probably been said before)... if you want no allies... can't you just run a sub-2k tournament? Or am I misinterpreting that rule (haven't played with allies myself yet).

Misinterpertation. Allies can be taken at any point value. At 2k you can actually have 2 allied detachments(as a FoC is the previous FoC, plus a fortification and an Allies detachment)

The only way I would is if it was like Gits posted, part of a narrative / series or "for fun" event. Not simply banning flyers and allies because someone wants to play 5th edition... it is there for the playing if people choose to!

Even as someone who is starting tyranids (when the Trollforged models are made/delivered ) I think allies are a cool addition that really mixes things up. I think the same is true of flyers at least in Moderation. 10 of them of course can be darn annoying...

But as Gits said:

Gitsplitta wrote:For example, I might propose in a 3 tournament series...

- no flyers
- no ground vehicles
- "troop units" must (by point value) make up half your army

Done in an interesting way and for the right reasons, this could be cool.

Done simply to punish a single type of build and/or to revert to a more 5th edition type of game, this would Not be something I'd be interested in.

So... it's all context!

Ah, got it. Thanks GT.

 Kilkrazy wrote:

 Alpharius wrote:
Sounds OK to me.

I'd think a 'no Allies' tournament would also sound good too.

I would support this and the No Flyers rule.

Then we may as well just go back to playing 5th edition.

 OverwatchCNC wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:

 Alpharius wrote:
Sounds OK to me.

I'd think a 'no Allies' tournament would also sound good too.

I would support this and the No Flyers rule.

Then we may as well just go back to playing 5th edition.

Until all armies are brought in line with 6th, then yes, that's actually the point of my original post.

Except thats not how the games works, has worked, or ever will work.

You can't just ignore an edition till everyone gets updated because some armies go multiple editions without an update.


If you are going to do that, just have a 5th edition tournament.

 Oaka wrote:

 OverwatchCNC wrote:

 Kilkrazy wrote:

 Alpharius wrote:
Sounds OK to me.

I'd think a 'no Allies' tournament would also sound good too.

I would support this and the No Flyers rule.

Then we may as well just go back to playing 5th edition.

Until all armies are brought in line with 6th, then yes, that's actually the point of my original post.

I honestly don't know how to respond to that.

You'll never have all armies brought in line with 6th before 7th edition comes out...

I hardly think a game without any flyers would be the same as playing 5th edition. Flyers are not the defining hallmark of 6th edition, they're just the one people are having trouble dealing with because they've been really poorly implemented (e.g. most flyers being overarmored and undercosted as originally introduced as Skimmers, few AA defenses except other fliers, etc).

The game is still very different from 5th even without flyers. The changes to CC, reserves, vehicles, characters and wound allocation make for a far different game either way.

Yeah, but they are relativly minor. Flyers are one of the bigger changes. Visually anyway.