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I have been giving this a lot of thought. I couldn't quite put my finger on it but I think that I have decided firmly that mission cards and 6 objectives on the table have ruined the essence of the game.

40k is a lot less talent based than it was.

A lot.

Instead of a "proper" tactical exchange with units working together rushikg flanks and there has been a shift towards random reserves simply there for scoring(drop pods anyone?) And 6 or 7 mini fights sort of strung across the board. Almost no real sense of progression really exists and lists are more important than talent.

Yes, Maelstrom Missions are mostly about luck and list building. Tactics and player agency has been reduced to the bare minimum.

As usual, good idea, badly implemented.

I actually like Tactical Objectives, their problem is they're totally random. You pick some cards out of a deck, and anything may come out. A run of good or bad luck can either make you win or make you lose a game no matter how good you are at using your units coherently or whatever.

Maelstrom can f you hardcore. Played in a tourney against demons, I got good kills and board control, but The objectives I drew were either on the opposite side of the table or getting blood and guts turn 1. or destroy emplacement in a game with none, or harness the warp and not have a psyker, or whatever.

I believe they started with the mission cards (3rd ed I think) in order to help players build a story background for their battles, but it seems that they've just went completely overboard with it. After all, what good general would ever go into battle with so many objectives to try and worry about? you can't possibly put together a winning strategy with your attention being pulled in so many different directions and so many goals all at once.

A war is comprised of many smaller battles, each battle having it's own objective or 2. Not each battle trying to win the entire war.

The problem isn't really with the mission cards themselves, but more with the way objectives are set up. First, there are simply too many objectives. The number should be dependent on the points value of each army, say maybe 1 objective for every full 500 points. That way a typical 1500 point game would have 3 objectives.

The other problem is that players are allowed to set up objectives in deployment zones. This should be a definite No-No unless the mission is some sort of hold the line style mission. In most cases, all objectives should be set up in the neutral zone between the deployments. That way there isn't a problem with getting lucky and just sitting in your deployment to collect points every turn.

IMO, the cards force players to react to changing situations, and that, to me anyway, makes the game MORE tactical, not less. Some of the cards are rather situational though, and GW should add some errata to remove those cards that don't apply so its no longer considered a house rule.

 Crimson Devil wrote:
Yes, Maelstrom Missions are mostly about luck and list building. Tactics and player agency has been reduced to the bare minimum.

This, 200% this.

Maelstrom missions are absolutely absurdly luck based. A lot of the objectives are also either trivially easy (cast a psychic power...sweet I have 4 psykers in my army) or often completely impossible (I have no psykers and no access to psykers...) or functionally impossible (no, my Tau aren't going to kill anything in the assault phase against this Khornate daemon army...). A lot of these also really have no purpose in being objectives (what's the point of simply casting a power just to cast?).

The more classic missions have some wonkiness too, things like scoring drop pods and the like certainly make it absurdly easy to hold/contest objectives just about anywhere you want/need to.

I prefer battles to the death.

People say the game isn't balanced for that but it sure helps with list building.

Besides it's more who you play with than how you play tbh.

You can't react to (most) mission cards. Your opponent will select the missions he can do and throw away the rest. What can I do as an opposing player when he draws "Manifest a psychic power"? What can I do when he draws "control objective 2" and objective 2 is right next to one of his troops choices? Certainly I can modify my opponents outlook on the success of a certain mission "Kill the opposing General in close combat" when my general is a Greater Deamon of Khorne, he might hesitate to accomplish that objective. Instead, he might just go for the "one unit in the enemy's deployment zone" and just scoot a Landspeeder into my deployment zone at the end of the game.

Tactics are how you carryout your strategic plan. With objective cards, you have no strategic plan and simply react to the mission cards while your opponent watches helplessly until it's his turn.

Good idea, poor implementation.

Too many cards are "hold objective X"

I can't forge the narrative enough to make 40k into musical chairs...

Most house rules make Maelstrom missions better. My personal favorite is to draw the cards at the top of the turn, both players are working on the same cards, and score them at the bottom of the game turn. Going second is better than going first by a long shot and you have no excuse to not have the elements in your army to capture stuff. You can also state you only cash in up to two cars and either player can discard the unused cards not wanted.

To the point of 'Tau can't assault' your at a disadvantage which is compensated by a best in class shooting phase. You can whittle the daemonkin bike unit to one model and charge in, wiping it out. The cards represent little narrative moments and do more than 'lol jump on objectives turn 5'. Maybe the brave sacrifice of a squad leader holding off a bloodthirster gives a big morale boost.

With all that said as it stands their current implementation is unfair but the best missions in standard 40k up till now.

Random objectives is the only way they could balance the game short of revamping army strengths.

 lazarian wrote:


To the point of 'Tau can't assault' your at a disadvantage which is compensated by a best in class shooting phase.

That only matters however if you draw cards based around shooting. This sort of balance justification only balances over many games, but in any one game can lead to absurdly one-sided results that leave little in the hands of the actual players choices and decisions, which is a really poor way to balance things and incentivizes otherwise unnecessary and unfluffy actions for its own sake.

The talent needed to successfully dominate in Maelstrom missions comes from list building and on the fly decision making. You need to build a list with units fast enough to get to the other side of the board, along with support units that will protect them from getting smeared across that side of the table, while finding the best units to hold and protect the objectives on your side of the board without ending up as expensive campers left out of range unable to affect the game. It's a very different sort of list building that operates on very different rules than standard 40k. The units that dominate in EW missions aren't necessarily the same that do so in Maelstrom.

The problem with Maelstrom is that too many players see the game about objective winning and not enough about objective denial. The key to winning consistently in maelstrom is making sure your opponent can't score the points they need to win. Pinning weapons are golden in Mael, as are ObSec units. Reacting to your opponents movements and trying to figure out what his objectives are is the great challenge of Maelstrom. If you think it's not tactical, it is because you're playing it like standard 40k.

That said, anyone who doesn't like randomness interjected into their game will no doubt hate Maelstrom. Two equal players with mirror armies are going to find the luck of the draw affecting the overall outcome. And with that in mind, I don't feel Maelstrom belongs anywhere near a tournament. But for non-tournament games, this playstyle offers wonderful tactical challenges to generals looking for more than mere mathhammer and netlisting.

Can someone clarify if, for example, you draw twice Capture Objective 3 does that count as 2 victory points? Cause people almost always count this as 2 VP

 Massawyrm wrote:
The talent needed to successfully dominate in Maelstrom missions comes from list building and on the fly decision making. You need to build a list with units fast enough to get to the other side of the board, along with support units that will protect them from getting smeared across that side of the table, while finding the best units to hold and protect the objectives on your side of the board without ending up as expensive campers left out of range unable to affect the game. It's a very different sort of list building that operates on very different rules than standard 40k. The units that dominate in EW missions aren't necessarily the same that do so in Maelstrom.

The problem with Maelstrom is that too many players see the game about objective winning and not enough about objective denial. The key to winning consistently in maelstrom is making sure your opponent can't score the points they need to win. Pinning weapons are golden in Mael, as are ObSec units. Reacting to your opponents movements and trying to figure out what his objectives are is the great challenge of Maelstrom. If you think it's not tactical, it is because you're playing it like standard 40k.

That said, anyone who doesn't like randomness interjected into their game will no doubt hate Maelstrom. Two equal players with mirror armies are going to find the luck of the draw affecting the overall outcome. And with that in mind, I don't feel Maelstrom belongs anywhere near a tournament. But for non-tournament games, this playstyle offers wonderful tactical challenges to generals looking for more than mere mathhammer and netlisting.

The problem here is that mobility and speed is not something every army has access to, particularly consistently useful speed (resilient and/or ObSec). Likewise, pinning is increasingly rare (no longer applies to sniper or barrage weapons for example) and tons of armies simple ignore it (can't pin a Fearless unit or a tank) or are very hard to pin anyway (e.g. Ld10 Necrons).

 Vaktathi wrote:
The problem here is that mobility and speed is not something every army has access to, particularly consistently useful speed (resilient and/or ObSec). Likewise, pinning is increasingly rare (no longer applies to sniper or barrage weapons for example) and tons of armies simple ignore it (can't pin a Fearless unit or a tank) or are very hard to pin anyway (e.g. Ld10 Necrons).

Sure, but the same can, and *is*, said about standard 40k. Not all codexes are created equal. In the current environment, DE, CSM, BA, DA, and MT are at the bottom of the food chain, unable to compete at any serious level. And yet, they have a host of advantages that make them amazing in Maelstrom. IK, Blob IG, and small count deathstar lists on the other hand can choke on it in this environment. They have no place in it.

I've never felt this game was all that "talent based" to begin with, however maelstorm shenanigans have really taken it up to 11 with regards to the game being decided on a random dice roll.

Also, how could you ever consider something that used "D3 victory points" was something that required skill to win at?

Yeah, I've been telling people this for a long time now. Maelstrom isn't balanced. I won't play it. I'm not interested in the randomness or imbalance it brings.

At least in Eternal War missions, you know what you need to accomplish to win. How you go about that ends up being up to you, and is what creates opportunities for good strategy and tactics. Smoke and mirrors. Knowing you'll likely win if you can hold 3 of the 5 objectives, selecting which objectives you'll be going for while diverting your opponent's attention away from 1 of them, letting him think it's safe, right up till you deliver the coup de grace at the bottom of turn 5 is an example of one of the exhilerating moments you experience when playing such missions.

That's much more enjoyable, in my opinion, than drawing a card and being like, "Oh yeah! I drew objective 6 again! Haha I win!"

I don't know why anyone ever thought Maelstrom was a good idea. I never bothered playing it. I knew what the deal was with it when I read the rules. Even though the 2 armies I play are very well suited to Maelstrom(DE and CWE), I still refuse to play it because it's not a fair game style.

 DalinCriid wrote:


Can someone clarify if, for example, you draw twice Capture Objective 3 does that count as 2 victory points? Cause people almost always count this as 2 VP

I haven't seen it any other way

Is there a way completely random objectives can be tactical?

If you narrowed down the objectives and got rid of the d3 points abilities I think you could come up with a clever gamestyle. If they actually play tested it they could have had an interesting game type of shifting battlefield priorities.

I think they strongly favor more mobile armies. Eternal War missions strongly favor more durable, static armies however, so I think it all shakes out in the wash.

It's way more tactical than: "hug cover for 4 turns than turbo-boost on objectives".

The maelstrom missions are good in theory but GW really needed to make a better set of rules for them. I think most people house rule them in one way or another to make it more playable.

Personally I always allow any impossible objectives to be tossed (stuff like Tau harnessing the warp, killing a flyer when there aren't any flyers, destroy a building when *gasp* nobody uses buildings, etc). Also I found through a bit of play testing that the standard maelstrom mission works a bit better with some house rules like using 4 cards, discarding 2 at the end of a turn, and/or allowing a discard when drawing your objectives (kinda ruins the tactical warlord traits but who even rolls on that tree?). I kinda like actually having to care about scoring objectives in the first few turns instead of working on killing the enemy and then working on scoring on turn 4-5 (if one side isn't already dead).

Also im not sure if its the proper procedure for maelstrom setup but I think its best to place the objectives down before deployment zones and sides are rolled for. It helps discourage stacking objectives in deployment zones.

 Blacksails wrote:
Is there a way completely random objectives can be tactical?

Well, just brainstorming here, but here's a couple:

First: remove "cast a psychic power, kingslayer, (that's already a point automatically dumb GW!) declare a challenge," and a few others. Remove all d3 and d3+3 extra options except for domination, which just gets made to 3 points. Always discard a card that is impossible and immediately redraw.

Game type 1: a single deck is used, and cards are drawn at the top of the turn. Players score cards at the bottom of the turn. If they can both claim the same card, no one gets it this turn, unless one person can claim it "more," as in like you killed 3 units and he killed 1 for a kill a unit card. After checking the scoring, the player on the top of the turn can decide which cards to discard before drawing new ones.

Game type 2: you and your opponent use separate decks. Remove all cards that are not "secure objective x" or other board position related cards such as ascendancy, domination, linebreaker, hold the line etc. Every turn, reveal 2 objectives and add them to your pool. Objectives are not scored until the end of the game. (At the end of turn 5, you should have 10 cards, 12 on turn 6 etc.)

Game type 3: stack up to 10 cards the way you want in your deck before placing objectives. Shuffle the rest, and place 6 random cards on top of the 10 stacked, with the rest underneath.

 BetrayTheWorld wrote:

I don't know why anyone ever thought Maelstrom was a good idea

Maybe they wanted to do more with the hobby than sit in their deployment zone for 4 turns then jump on a couple objectives just before the game ends. My Guard army is well suited for EW games, and they're extremely boring.

MarsNZ wrote:

 BetrayTheWorld wrote:

I don't know why anyone ever thought Maelstrom was a good idea

Maybe they wanted to do more with the hobby than sit in their deployment zone for 4 turns then jump on a couple objectives just before the game ends. My Guard army is well suited for EW games, and they're extremely boring.

The 3e narrative style core rulebook missions were awesome. I wish they would've kept to that style instead of random gen objectives.

I think if there was 3 objective markers in the middle of the board

and if you had like 18 cards that gave 2VP each and you dealt one per turn and they went face up on the table and won by either side then it could really work well.

Could be literally be turn one - one card turn two two cards and so on

I used to like tactical objectives but I realized how fethed up they were last time I played. It was a 2500 IG vs Eldar game and I killed everything and anything in his list. My attrition rate was 51%, he had 3 or 4 space elves on the TT at the end of the 7th turn.

I lost 18-13 because he had jetbikes and good objectives. We're still trying to explain such a "defeat" in our campaign fluff.