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I'd love to hear from actual organizers, but with the new books coming out , the change in FOC w/ Allies and Formations, plus it looks like Major Characters are going to be LOW from here on out probably. What's the number one reason that Tournaments are sticking to the " 1 Primary, 1 Ally or 1 Formation" style.

I play with a lot of my friends and to me at least it's more freeing and adds more depth and interest to the game , I can understand restrictions on Come the Apocalpyse and a restriction even to Desperate Allies, but why the push toward a FOC of just 1 Primary 1 ally or Formation .

GW is obviously gearing the game for "bigger" battles w/ Lords of War and Super Heavies becoming more common.

If anything this huge restriction seems like a millstone. Granted I haven't played in many national tournaments just some friendly round robin style money in the pot with friends, but we always just let you take whatever because it all eventually balances out. I mean Space Wolves have their own formation in their own book etc.. There's no more Speed Cult in Orks, which will probably be the case for a while as they turn those into Datalslates for Formations.

The big restriction I've seen is on Lords of Wars, but you can restrict specific ones, BAO did it and it turned out fine. They restricted what you were allowed to have, allowed some Forgeworld and there wasn't a game winning list that dominated because of it.

So , what are the main reason? Balance? Because Armies now can manipulate the FOC as it is. I mean with a Ally you can take 8 Heralds in a Chaos , etc.. etc.. There are multiple ways some armies have to manipulate the FOC that other armies just do not have period.

If anything , changing the way it's done and just disallowing certain units as LOW seems the way to go.

People are already discussing changes going forward...but almost no one I know wants completely unlimited battle forged or unbound armies. Part of the reason I believe for the initial limiting is because the change to the FOC is huge compared to what has been the FOC for many years...and completely unrestricted is terrible for the game. I think the popular idea now is that every detachment will be unique (0-1), so you can take more than 2, but not 2 of the some (so no double cad, no formation spamming etc.)

i think that's a really good idea to make each detachment unique! that's what I'd like to see myself.

The problem is balancing people who will use certain power combos, with people that want to run a more balanced approach. No one wants to show up to a tournament and get rolled by the guy that takes the most broken things you can come up with. At the same time you want to let people use the models they have paid good money and spent time and effort on. I personally like the unique idea, it lets people bring a knight, an inquisitor, and a space marine list. It avoids some of the craziest stuff. Thus far the tournaments my group has been running have just stuck to the primary plus 1 of something else and only 1. That may just change though. Everyone agrees though they don't want to go to an unbound tournament.

We are trying a tournament that allows 1 Lord of war choice next month. I played in a tournament last week that allowed lords of war put on by a store. I brought one and found the armies I played against that had no Lord of war I was able to walk over. Granted they did not seem to take the things needed to take down a super heavy, but against a list with no Lord of war I suspect they may have done ok. The hard thing with lords of war is that some of them are clearly more useful or better than others. As an organizer though it's very hard to ban individual units because then you feel like you're picking on certain armies or players. So we are allowing any of the lords of war, but I think we as a group are going to use various formats at each tournament on a cycle. That way we can let stuff in and cater to each play style on a tournament by tournament basis. Obviously I'm talking about a smaller tournament with less than 30 people at the moment. I think when you start getting larger numbers you almost have to be more restrictive.

The big problem I see is that Lords of War are now going to be the norm, meaning special characters or at least major special characters are going to be LOW.Specifically I could see Marneus, Abaddon, etc.. becoming Lord of War Choices.So now tournaments are going to have to go into a restricted style becaue honestly it's kind of a gak thing to do to orks to say " No, you can't take Gaz, even though he's a character that's important fluff and game wise".


That's just my whole point that I think we'll see more LOW and more Formations specifically things like Bikes not as troops but instead Formation for bikes etc..As for the broken well honestly most of the armies now can get broken armies as they can get around the HQ requirement etc.... Eldar for instance can take 12 HQs on a techincality, Chaos Daemons can take 5 w/ Heralds. It just gives major advantage to some other armies because they have the ability to manipulate their FOC but others dont.

what a more unrestricted enviroment allows is armies like Tyranids / Orks/ etc... allows them to build out their army.Your always going to see seerstar , etc.. because that is just a powerful build, but that's because it does go against the FOC.Seerstar etc.. won't go away with a FOC change in rules, but it will allow other armies to build heavier lists to counter it.

Except that's not true seer star would go away in unrestricted battle forged and be replaced by 10 far seers and 20 jet bike squads (fit to your point cap) who fly around and summon daemons. And crap like that. People always say that removing the restriction helps the bottom armies...it doesn't the top armies are top because they are very efficient, so removing restrictions allows them to abuse that even more. I agree character lords of war will likely be allowed, but that does not necessitate super heavy lords of war (though it also does not mean they need be excluded.).

Why do you have a problem with coa and desperate allies? Seems so random. ..

P.s. Eldar can take 16 hqs not on a technicality but if we are counting things like warlocks as hq choices then.

Marines can take 12 hqs
Necrons can take 22
Orks can take 5 using their new detachment and a cad
Wolves can take what 7 or 8
Dark angels can take 12
Blood angels can take 12


Etc.... Lots of armies have hqs that don't take up slots.

Brendan's point is what people miss. Maybe it's just an East Coast thing, as some have pointed out, but unlimited CAD is going to result in things like farseer jetcouncils summoning tons of daemons while being fortuned/invis and multi-wound each, supported by 10+ obsec guardian jetbike units hiding around the place.

I'm not sure this is unavoidable, btw, but when people are like "so what if you can spam a few extra X" they're probably not fully cognizant of the craziness that can be pulled off. It's going to happen, eventually, but even within the super crunchy fluffy narrative event at NOVA there were some open battleforged/forgeworld-allowed lists that caused some substantial groans. It'll be interesting to see what happens when it's allowed at an event that is attended by top tier list-breakers.

 pizzaguardian wrote:
Why do you have a problem with coa and desperate allies? Seems so random. ..

I agree with pizza, I understand being uncomfortable with them less than allowing many multiple detachments. I've said it before and I'll say it again, Battle Brothers create the more imbalanced combinations with their ability to cross rules and transports etc. Why are people worried about CTA (and even DA) which come with pretty decent restrictions once you try fitting them in your deployment zone (trust me, not that easy, sporadic forced deployment) when we are already allowing combinations which created special rule splodges (Or IC stars).

Other than the majority of people who play want to (and do) take advantage of their BB's, but don't want people to be able to take advantage of their CTA's. And fluff, some people don't like the fluff point.

What I have seen in several major tournaments that allowed the LOW and people knew it well in advance is it actually balances out some of the power combo's. Yes you have to be prepared for the super heavy LOW but units like Seer start suddenly become less dependable and the even the Grimoir cant help you with D weapons

The Maul in the Mall this year included Forgeworld Lords of War too so we saw all those wonderful titans....and a standard Necron force beat them all hehe. There are counters but I feel like right now with the restrictions based on fear we are not letting the Meta develop into what it could be. I don't see Unbound falling into any reasonable national tourney but all the big stuff will find a home there and we will find balance with that. YMMV

Most superheavies are much better than they were upon release of escalation in 6e. The issue IMO tends to be that they create one sided match-ups. Where if the opponent quickly deals with the LOW, they win and if not they often lose.

Having multiple CADs would not in fact lead to any more abuse than there already is.Sure people are like well they'll take 10 Farseers for 5 Cads and then 10 small squads or whatever.Model count does in fact matter in games, especially first turn.Everything has it's counter, sure take 10 Farseers etc.. whatever then you face a Cullexus and your army shuts down and you get blasted to smithereens.Everything has it's counter is what i am saying.The more people push away from it the more it seems that armies that are being released if anything are including more formations and lords of war.

It's a slippery slope argument to say well X woudl just be taken and it'd be more unbalanced. Well no, that's the point, sure that person may take that but then he runs up against someone who has 2 or more assassins and the game ends for them.

If anything you just see stagnation, take a comparison look at 6th edition Nova and 7th edition Nova and see if there was any real change because there wasn't. It's just boring to play against the same lists over and over again. I mean how many Eldar were there? How many Space Marines?

I think the following would be a fair restriction.

1) No unbound lists. You may use CADs or any special detachments that appear in your own codex.

2) Super heavies with Ranged D options cannot take them. Super heavies with automatic ranged D cannot be taken.

3) No super heavies with ranged blast weapons that are both Str8+ and ignore cover.


So you could take your Reaver or Warhound titan if you wanted, it just couldn't take any of its Str D ranged weapon options. No Shadowsword or Banehammer either.

People still get their toys, but are limited to some of the less crazy options.

Breng77 wrote:
Most superheavies are much better than they were upon release of escalation in 6e. The issue IMO tends to be that they create one sided match-ups. Where if the opponent quickly deals with the LOW, they win and if not they often lose.

While this is true, how is this any different from getting alpha striked by Taudar or podded Grav Centurians?

 Grey Templar wrote:
I think the following would be a fair restriction.

1) No unbound lists. You may use CADs or any special detachments that appear in your own codex.

2) Super heavies with Ranged D options cannot take them. Super heavies with automatic ranged D cannot be taken.

3) No super heavies with ranged blast weapons that are both Str8+ and ignore cover.


So you could take your Reaver or Warhound titan if you wanted, it just couldn't take any of its Str D ranged weapon options. No Shadowsword or Banehammer either.

People still get their toys, but are limited to some of the less crazy options.

Seems excessive and not even accomplishes its goal. İmo not even fair either.

C'tan goes through these selections easily. I also don't understand the problem with D weapons in 7th. In 6th yes they were just invalidating nearly all of the army builds but not anymore.

As specific examples neither shadowsword or even stromsword is not unmanagable or unfun to play against imo. The Tau ritpide stars were doing what stormsword is doing now in half of 6th and they were just strong, nobody was going around banning those.

 pizzaguardian wrote:

 Grey Templar wrote:
I think the following would be a fair restriction.

1) No unbound lists. You may use CADs or any special detachments that appear in your own codex.

2) Super heavies with Ranged D options cannot take them. Super heavies with automatic ranged D cannot be taken.

3) No super heavies with ranged blast weapons that are both Str8+ and ignore cover.


So you could take your Reaver or Warhound titan if you wanted, it just couldn't take any of its Str D ranged weapon options. No Shadowsword or Banehammer either.

People still get their toys, but are limited to some of the less crazy options.

Seems excessive and not even accomplishes its goal. İmo not even fair either.

C'tan goes through these selections easily. I also don't understand the problem with D weapons in 7th. In 6th yes they were just invalidating nearly all of the army builds but not anymore.

As specific examples neither shadowsword or even stromsword is not unmanagable or unfun to play against imo. The Tau ritpide stars were doing what stormsword is doing now in half of 6th and they were just strong, nobody was going around banning those.

I guess you are right. I'm not totally opposed to ranged D weapons, but spamming them is still a problem.

Maybe change it to a single unit can only have 1 ranged D weapon. So you could have a Warhound with 1 turbolaser, but not 2.

C'tan still can't take their most ridiculous weapons with these restrictions.

Simple ideas for moving forward.

- No Unbound.

- All detachments are unique. (means you can't spam CADs or formations but let's you take whatever you want points allowing)

- Small LoW Ban list (for me, no titans or revenant C'tan is enough).

Done.

I think if you ban titans you need to ban Knights as well.

I think banning certain weapons and maybe certain individual titan sized units is reasonable, but not a blanket ban.

Because can you honestly say a Warhound is so much more powerful than 2 Knights?

The Warhound will probably kill one and then die to the second one's melee.

Has Aetaos'rau'keres been nerfed in some way that I'm not aware of? What can kill that guy, especially if he gets grimoire support?

When Escalation hit and the Forgeworld PDF came out, the massive metagame thread concluded that unless he gets grounded and is autokilled by strength D, he wins every game. Then 7th came and he became a scoring unit and strength D was nerfed. Not to mention he can play in an unbound list which removes some force organisation concerns because of his points cost.

Either way, I think the best point being made in this thread is that LoW make imbalanced games, no matter if they're effective or not, and that makes for a less interesting game. They win big or they lose big, and some of them mostly win big with little or no chance for the enemy to do anything at all. The game isn't a game unless both players atleast had the illusion that they won or lost because of good or bad in game decisions. It's been mentioned time and time again that 40K used to be part list building and part gaming, but that the emphasis keeps moving more and more towards list building only. These threads are circular and everything that needs to be said has been said hundreds of times already at Dakka. Both sides have made their argument, and people will never agree on the matter.

The scene has always been divided, but now it's more divided than ever. Only GW can be the source of change, and we know this game will dwindle smaller and smaller untill its only played by a handful of players around the world in total before any real change can happen.

 Phazael wrote:

Breng77 wrote:
Most superheavies are much better than they were upon release of escalation in 6e. The issue IMO tends to be that they create one sided match-ups. Where if the opponent quickly deals with the LOW, they win and if not they often lose.

While this is true, how is this any different from getting alpha striked by Taudar or podded Grav Centurians?

It's not it just exacerbates the issue, making it even more common.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Hollismason wrote:
Having multiple CADs would not in fact lead to any more abuse than there already is.Sure people are like well they'll take 10 Farseers for 5 Cads and then 10 small squads or whatever.Model count does in fact matter in games, especially first turn.Everything has it's counter, sure take 10 Farseers etc.. whatever then you face a Cullexus and your army shuts down and you get blasted to smithereens.Everything has it's counter is what i am saying.The more people push away from it the more it seems that armies that are being released if anything are including more formations and lords of war.

It's a slippery slope argument to say well X woudl just be taken and it'd be more unbalanced. Well no, that's the point, sure that person may take that but then he runs up against someone who has 2 or more assassins and the game ends for them.

If anything you just see stagnation, take a comparison look at 6th edition Nova and 7th edition Nova and see if there was any real change because there wasn't. It's just boring to play against the same lists over and over again. I mean how many Eldar were there? How many Space Marines?

Except aren't assassins unique so you only get one, and unlike deathstars you won't stop all the far seers, running around summoning daemons (making model count a non-issue.). To me it seems that you don't like the current meta so in your opinion different is better. Even if it is not better. I think with changes you still se a ton of eldar at the top. Just with more abusive lists.

While I'm a huge opponent to making tournament-format decisions based on inter-Codex balance (as opposed to gamewide issues), allowing unlimited detachments has a serious problem in that regard, in that the vast majority of the benefit is to Imperial armies.

As soon as you open up unlimited detachments, every Imperial army can throw in an Inquisitor and a Knight and an Assassin at zero opportunity cost, with no alliance downsides and all the benefits. What does everyone else get? Virtually nothing, outside of quirky play-around-OEO builds or somebody wanting to take multiple Formations. Meanwhile, your quote-unquote Space Wolf list can take Tigurius+Scout Tax and have all his Psychic shenanigans (or White Scars H&R, or etc etc etc) work perfectly on the dozen other books worth of units you suddenly have Battle Brother-level access to without having to worry about any outside limitations, many of which don't even require further FOC investment.

It's one of the really important points that comes up when tournaments are discussing Forge World inclusion (once people get past the point of thinking Forge World is banned for single unit-level balance issues); even if you ignore all the other problems and decide to dump the full Forge World library into the game, you're overly benefitting the Imperial Codexes, because probably 70%+ of the Forge World units are Imperial and the other 30% is split amongst all the Xenos combined.

When discussed in the context of the Forge World debates, I usually refer to a hypothetical MTG scenario:

Imagine MTG introduced a "Collector's Range" of cards, released in sets, as follows:

Set 1: Red vs Black
Set 2. Blue vs Red
Set 3. Red vs Green
Set 4: Red vs Black pt. 2
Set 5: Red vs White vs Green
Set 6: Red vs. White

...and so forth. When the topic of including these "Collector's Range" sets in tournaments comes up, you can imagine the Red players would be all for it, and everyone else slightly less so.

The detachment problem may not be quite so lopsided as the Forge World problem, but it would be absurd to say abandoning detachment limits doesn't preferentially benefit Imperial armies to a pretty meaningful degree.

I didn't say tournaments should open up to unbound just that with the way the rules are going they are most certainly going to have to allow for LOW for certain armies , otherwise they inadvertently hinder armies because specific special characters are now LOW.

For Example, when the 7th edition Codex for Space Marine does come out there is no doubt that Marneus w/ be a LOW.

Another one is the Assassins codex, it's not like a normal thing it's a detachment, which is weird in itself.

Basically GW is now writing its books with the idea that you will be playing with their FOC rules.

Hollismason wrote:
I didn't say tournaments should open up to unbound just that with the way the rules are going they are most certainly going to have to allow for LOW for certain armies , otherwise they inadvertently hinder armies because specific special characters are now LOW.

For Example, when the 7th edition Codex for Space Marine does come out there is no doubt that Marneus w/ be a LOW.

Another one is the Assassins codex, it's not like a normal thing it's a detachment, which is weird in itself.

Basically GW is now writing its books with the idea that you will be playing with their FOC rules.

Tournaments are already allowing the Infantry based LoW's to be used. Most upcoming up major tournaments i see are allowing them.