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 Desubot wrote:
This game hasn't been about tactics forever.

its all about the strategy.

Yeah, business strategy.

The Maelstrom missions are helluva more fun than Eternal War ones. We've stopped playing Eternal War altogether.
Just killing stuff up to turns 5-7 and then reaching objectives is BORING.

 Vector Strike wrote:
The Maelstrom missions are helluva more fun than Eternal War ones. We've stopped playing Eternal War altogether.
Just killing stuff up to turns 5-7 and then reaching objectives is BORING.

And randomly bopping around the board like a schizophrenic to cover totally random objectives is even further from a wargame than 40k has ever been.

It kills me that GW has, in the past, made several brilliant mission systems. You have the 40k 3rd edition "narrative" style missions, which were relatively inventive and even asymmetric sometimes - missions like that would be miles ahead of Eternal War.

Then you have the standard Epic: Armageddon mission (my favorite), where there are always 6 physical objectives (one on each player's table edge, two on each player's table half outside the deployment zones) and several ways of scoring points (holding different combinations of objective markers, killing their most expensive unit, keeping them out of your table half). At the end of each turn after the 2nd, you start checking the score - if a player has scored 2+ points, and more points than the other player, he/she wins. Points aren't cumulative either, so you won't just rack up points every turn for sitting on an objective.

It's perfectly symmetric, both players have perfect information, there are a variety of ways you could win that reward different strategies, and you have to start moving on objectives early to keep your opponent from flat-out winning at the end of turn 3 (and without rewarding gunlines either - the way the objective combinations are structured, sitting in your own deployment zone is almost an auto-lose, so you're going to end up fighting to hold mid-board objective markers).

That's how you set up a good, fluid, dynamic mission system. In contrast, Eternal War is definitely boring, and Maelstrom is a misguided attempt at shaking up gunlines by artificially injecting movement into the game (you never know where you'll have to go next! it's not a battle, it's Simon Says). In both Eternal War and Maelstrom, a roll of the dice or a draw of a card often plays a larger role in determining victory than the actual players. With Eternal War you do know exactly what to do once the game starts, but some armies or specific army lists are boned at certain missions - so it's a serious uphill battle after the first roll to determine deployment and mission.

With the E:A missions, you can come up with a strategy ahead of time (like in Eternal War) and you're forced to respond tactically to your opponent's movements early on (like Maelstrom wishes it could do).

Honestly. The only way there should be a draw card system, would be before the game started. Like. Draw 6 cards, choose 3 and discard the rest. Those 3 objectives on your card are now your objective of your mission. Not stupid things like "manifest a power" but things like holding a specified amount of objectives for X amount of rounds or something truly tactical that you can react to and deploy for, while your opponent counter deploys you and does his best to prevent you from achieving his mission, while achieving his own.
Not this kindda' crap, were you randomly draw bs objectives that requires zero thought process and has zero skill involved.
IMO "Deadlock" is the worst offender and the most obnoxious mission in the game. 9/10 times you or your opponent gets a lucky draw and then proceeds to score a stupendous amount of VP, meanwhile if you're unlucky you can only discard 1 card, which mean that you can't ever draw a new card the next round, due to the limit decreasing for every round, so if you're behind from the first round, you usually always loose the game, as it's impossible to catch up. The game is literally decided on turn 1 by luck of the draw. By the Emperor, I despise that mission so much!

 Vector Strike wrote:
The Maelstrom missions are helluva more fun than Eternal War ones. We've stopped playing Eternal War altogether.
Just killing stuff up to turns 5-7 and then reaching objectives is BORING.

+ 1, and also it's really noob friendly. It breaks my heart when I see new players being destroyed 5,6 games in a row. Malestorm really gives you a chance if you are new and you can always make it a draw with a lucky card - Capture Objective # 2 and then you just move your unit with a cruising speed Bam Draw game. Well not always, but it's really nice sometimes.

Or even worse with a bad draw. How does anyone get better at the game when little of what they do really matter in the game's outcome?

It's random nonsense.
Such schizophrenic back and forth of random objectives kicks me out of my head narrative.
It also takes away player skill and hands it over to randomness.
Yeah, noobies might do better with it, because it's random. Just roll a bucket of dice, count it up and see who rolled higher. Fun!

My local league uses its own list of maelstrom missions. They're the same as in the rule book, but a lot of the impossible or odd ones taken out. For tournaments the rule is if it's impossible to earn that objective (IE must destroy an enemy fortification or building but the opponent has none), then you get to reroll for them.

Another house rule for the area on tourney's is no objectives in the deployment area. Prevents that 'I camp on you' process

 OrkaMorka wrote:
My local league uses its own list of maelstrom missions. They're the same as in the rule book, but a lot of the impossible or odd ones taken out. For tournaments the rule is if it's impossible to earn that objective (IE must destroy an enemy fortification or building but the opponent has none), then you get to reroll for them.

Another house rule for the area on tourney's is no objectives in the deployment area. Prevents that 'I camp on you' process

Yeah I've found that limiting the objectives in deployments to one each makes a more interesting game.

Obviously this doesn't apply to anyone on here as i don't any of you, but in my local group, it seems the only people who dislike the maelstrom missions are the players that like to know they've won before the game even starts.
For those of us that enjoy playing, win or lose, it adds a lot to the game.

It's definitely not designed for tournament games. I've played tournaments using objective cards and it was gak. Plain and simple. But then i dont find tournaments to as fun as pick up or narrative games

darkcloak wrote:
Name one real life instance where an army was destroyed but still won the battle.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pyrrhic_victory

Y'all need to read up on your military history if you think that has never happened.

Thermopylae and The Alamo. In both cases, the defenders were annihilated, but their defiance meant the attacking force was subsequently defeated.

What really bugs me the most about tactical objectives is all the HOLD X objectives are the same.

Why is there no diversity?

Attack Objective X, Reward 2 Points (while at the same time the defender gains 2 Point for succesfully defending it if the attacker fails)
Reclaim a random Objective, 3 Points
Purge an Objective from enemy presence, 1 Point (without capturing)

Some rounds we´ve played we just sat on our objectives with our units farming points looking angry at the other units sitting on their objective. Because next round we could draw to hold the objective we are currently sitting on. If i go out and charge i lose my objective and the potential to score. Gimme a reason to go out and charge the feth out of an occupied objective and gimme an appropriate reward.

SicSemperTyrannis wrote:
Gimme a reason to go out and charge the feth out of an occupied objective and gimme an appropriate reward.

This is like saying there's no need for defense in basketball, because letting them score only means you get the ball. The reason to charge the guy on the objective is to deny him the chance to score from it. Maelstrom is as much about defense as it is offense. Making sure your opponent can't score from objectives puts you that much closer to victory. You only need to win by one point, so sometimes it's worth sacrificing a unit if it means putting your opponent behind.

darkcloak wrote:
Name one real life instance where an army was destroyed but still won the battle.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Barbarossa

 Massawyrm wrote:

SicSemperTyrannis wrote:
Gimme a reason to go out and charge the feth out of an occupied objective and gimme an appropriate reward.

This is like saying there's no need for defense in basketball, because letting them score only means you get the ball. The reason to charge the guy on the objective is to deny him the chance to score from it. Maelstrom is as much about defense as it is offense. Making sure your opponent can't score from objectives puts you that much closer to victory. You only need to win by one point, so sometimes it's worth sacrificing a unit if it means putting your opponent behind.

No it isn't if you have more and faster msu units, then you have a higher chance to complet mission then someone with a slower force. Anyway how do you stop a mass drop pods or jetbikes from being on the objective they want anyway?

darkcloak wrote:

 tenebre wrote:
the tac objectives are good but require some house rules to avoid getting boned on luck.

re: tactics.. you all need to research what the word means.

almost wiping an opponent out and losing because they scored more objectives literally means your tactics were poor. if you use objectives the tactical focus is objectives not tabling. Just house rule removal of certain unattainable ones or silly ones. We also only place one objective in each deployment zone to avoid the easy camping points.

tactical != killing opponent
"of, relating to, or constituting actions carefully planned to gain a specific military end"

so unless the only way to win to 100% enemy attrition, playing a game and only counting casualties in fact means you are not playing tactical.

with cards it allows for dynamic and ever changing tactics in order to meet the new objectives. This requires sometimes scrapping your entire initial plan and going a different route. This should prove more challenging and exciting.

Name one real life instance where an army was destroyed but still won the battle.

MOST!!!!!! you arent playing your entire army! thats for Epic this is a small force fighting one battle. They are tasked with one goal (obtain objective) while the primary force is engaged in a larger battle.

if we were to play with entire armies then logistics and command would need to factor into the rules as well as many other things which are not practical at this scale.

 Massawyrm wrote:
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.

Can't speak for the rest, but CSM are amazing at what?

Mobility, msu, only having CAD(and therefore obsec) available to them, some durability, some good killy bits.

CSM suck in a "try and table your opponent" match, but are pretty great at a tactical objectives game.

Most if my armies are set up for defense and a few objective grabbers, i don't play to kill as much of the opponent as i can unless I am playing my Orks(then feth the objective tabling is an auto-win).

I look at tactical objectives like this: when the card says take objective x; that objective has some small momentary tactical viability and thetefore my army needs to go search it(mysterious objectives help this out immensely), the rest are dependant on the tides of battle but can make sense in the narrative.

Tactical objectives have made the game more tactical; before it was a 4-6 turn game of just killing dudes with that final turn rush to grab or contest as many objectives as possible. There is very little strategy involved in that, especially in games with only 3 or so objectives 1 of which you have gad a unit camping on since deployment, 1 you have been trying to shift your opponents campers off of, and the last one being fought over in the middle with dead units adding vps to their opponents(why i never liked msu's).

CSM have great mobility? Uhh...

Many of you are confusing a war with a battle.

A battle is a single instance or confrontation in a war (which contains many battles)

Losing all your troops has never won the battle and sure doesn't win a war (that is by the efforts of other battles that were won)

In every instance listed as examples, while the war was won, that battle was lost.

I agree that if an army is tabled, then they lose regardless of VP. However, I also believe that there should be some balancing objectives that could do just the opposite (such as hold x objective for y turns or kill specified commander... oh wait that was kinda what 3rd did)

nothing too inherently wrong with the card system, it sure makes for a random encounter. If you want something more for a competitive system, do what a poster said earlier.

1. Remove VPs for First Blood, Linebreaker and Kill the Warlord (if your warlord trait gives a VP for it then keep that).
2. Remove some of the worst cards in the deck...Recon, Hungry for Glory, Harness the Warp, Witch Hunter, Scour the skies, demolitions).
3. Shuffle remaining deck and deal x amount cards to yourself (opponent does same with his deck). The number should be determined by size of game. 0-999pts (6 cards), 1000-1999pts (9 cards), 2k+ (12 cards)
4. Pick up to 3 cards from hand and discard...re-draw same number of cards.

These are your objectives for the game.

Yeah see if you dealt x cards out randomly and used them all game, or selected them pre-game from a predetermined pool?

Then you'd remove the whole silly card scrambling fricassee entirely! But that's self evident. The idea is really to take the random nature of warfare and implement it in a logical way. No reasonable high command would be going into battle without knowing what the plan was, even if the plan was just the standard Holy-Crap-We-Done-Got-Ambushed-Plan.

Now if two people sat down and said well, what's the battle about, and then went through the cards and picked out the ones might be relevant to the :coughcough: narrative, then maybe the cards could be... amazing?

darkcloak wrote:
Name one real life instance where an army was destroyed but still won the battle.

There is a difference between winning the battle and winning the war. 40k doesn't represent a war, much less an entire battle.

There are countless occurrences in our history of units the size of your average 40k army being wiped out completely while still contributing to the overall success of their army in any given battle or war. Victory is built from little successes and many of those involve sacrifices.

I love the Maelstrom missions. Admittedly they work better with a few house rules, we use three.

1. Auto discard for any unachievable objectives. If you could achieve it at the beginning of the game then you have to discard it normally. (its not your opponent's fault he killed your only psyker and then you drew your cast a psychic power objective afterwards.

2. Any objectives that are d3 are worth only 1 point, those d3+3 objectives are worth 3. (we find it easier to just count cards than remember who rolled what)

3 You can only score one "control objective X" once per turn for each objective. (you don't get to draw three "control objective 2" cards in one turn and get three quick points for squatting there for a turn. If you want the points, stay there long enough to get them all, at least you know what you'll be doing for a while.

Players in my Meta have evolved into the tendency (wouldn't call it a house rule by any means) of allowing only one objective to be placed within each players deployment zone. (the point is to make players move about the table IMO, camping all three leads to the same boring eternal war missions we all know, and have known for how long now?)

The only other rule that we are considering is allowing players to draw their first turn objectives BEFORE deployment. Possibly a portion or random amount of them. You probably had some kind of plan when you got up this morning, right?

To me the random objectives are a fair representation of an ever changing battlefield. Control objective 3 is easily seen as the order to ensure a house is clear of enemy snipers or a unit readying an ambush. The unit clears it, finds no threat or reduces it, then moves on to the next task or sits still to deny its use by the enemy at a later time.

Well being that most people will argue that a "proppa" game of 40k requires around 2500 points, I'd wager that comparatively in-universe that would be equivalent to a battle. A small one perhaps, but still an engagement nonetheless.

I can think of a few real world instances where lets say for example a kamikaze wing might be totally destroyed and still gain a meaningful objective, but for our purposes (which is playing with our dollies) we don't count these examples. If you want a game to simulate that sort of realism then maybe GW is the wrong choice?

We are dealing with sci-fi combat on a battlefield level, there needs to be some sort of semblance of implied realism or the whole mechanic breaks down!

Can you imagine the debriefing on a maelstrom mission in fluffspout?

Chapta Masta! We hahv won de battul!

Excellent! What the hell were we doing down there anyways? It could have been 5-15 different things from over 50 or so options, what was it?

Chapta Masta, dah Librahreen cast deh powas sir. An duh Stehl Rane wiffout duh Mahreens captoored all deh obej... Ojebe... Obenebe...

Objectives?

Yassa Chapta Masta! We cappatah deh obej... Ojebe...


Yes. Indrick Boreal had a cousin, and he plays maelstrom...

darkcloak wrote:
Well being that most people will argue that a "proppa" game of 40k requires around 2500 points, I'd wager that comparatively in-universe that would be equivalent to a battle. A small one perhaps, but still an engagement nonetheless.

In-universe examples usually comprise forces numbering in the millions. I wouldn't consider 2500 points anything but a large game, and even then it would be a far cry from a battle.

I don't need to do your homework for you, but let's take the 3rd Guard Chasseurs "last stand" at Waterloo. By most accounts they died to the man, or at least the survivors melted away and fled the battlefield as best they could. At any rate, the unit ceased to exist. All of the commanders on both sides of the battlefield acknowledge the value of the units sacrifice in holding up the Allied advance so as to allow the escape an increased portion of the retreating French army. So while the unit was destroyed, it served a useful military purpose and was successful in its mission, intended or otherwise.

To be clear, I can draw from my own real world experience to make a chaotic and confused battlefield with often painfully idiotic commands given in the heat of the moment realistic. But I certainly don't need too, the Maelstrom missions do a fine job of breaking up the static gun line, late game jump for objectives mechanic that has dominated 40k for such a long time. In the context that 40k is a game played with toys based on fictional characters and races existing in a fictional universe ruled by fictional realities, I'm fine with a lack "true realism".

Um... Pointing at Waterloo as an example of pyrrhic victory?

At any rate your example of real world experience probably meshes with my idea of real but not too real just fine.

I agree with the OP. Maelstrom is immersion breaking and pointless. Don't let GW try and tell you how to use the cards. They can't even get their favourite codex right so...

Let me tell you how to use them!


Automatically Appended Next Post:
But seriously, Waterloo?

Beef Wellington dude!

I like using maelstroms as a secondary objective...Choose an
Eternal War objective, it's worth 3 VPs, then choose your maelstrom objective, the person with the most gets 2VPs.
Keep first blood, Warlord and Linebreaker for one point each and you get a decent balanced game....
Getting dominated on the Maelstrom, not to worry, concentrate on the Primary and vice versa.
Tune the VPs to personal preference ymmv.

Not at all, as they are not obligatory. Maelstrom was supposed to be for fun games to add a new dimension for long time players. There are other mission types other than maelstrom that don't have the unpredictable and random nature that allow more tactical games.

darkcloak wrote:
Um... Pointing at Waterloo as an example of pyrrhic victory?

I did no such thing. A pyrrhic victory is where the cost of winning outweighs the value of the victory itself, that's not what I'm talking about at all. If a unit is destroyed achieving an objective that has a greater value than the continued presence of the unit, is that not a win? After all, you can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs.

You asked for an instance where a unit was entirely wiped out and could still be said to have won the engagement. The 3rd Chasseurs were destroyed at Waterloo, on the losing side, but certainly fulfilled the military purpose of a rearguard. Unit wiped out, yes, objective (whether it was intended or not) achieved, yes. History is full of such instances, your point that a 40k game should never end where one side is crushed by the other but still manages to win by achieving its objectives, is just wrong.

Table your opponent fine. Fail to do so while failing to carry the scenario objectives and you lose. YMMV, but I enjoy it far more than the eternal war missions that have been kicking around for forever.

Nah I asked for an example of any army... The 3rd Chasseurs hardly comprises an entire army now does it?


Regardless, I think we can both agree that real life examples have little to no bearing on a SciFi wargame, especially one so profoundly broken. My real life question was whether or not an army can be destroyed and still "win" the battle. Don't split that into hairs because that's just not worth it. Suddenly we have vets talking about actual warfare and well, that just is no fun.

I'd love to chat more about this but my phone hates me so... Hard to type, no fun correcting myself every 5 words.