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This weekend was the Know No Mercy Grand Tournament, run by one of our local Sacramento players. This was the third Know No Mercy, and like the previous two, it was a well run, very fun event. It also deviated significantly from the default mission structure, rules modifications, and FAQ’s that have become the default in most 40k tournaments. It was a lot of fun, but because of the significant deviance from the norm I think there were a lot of important lessons for the community to be had.

The Event:


The tournament itself was 6 games, using a mix of ITC, Nova, and core rulebook missions. There were no erratas used, so Strength D was full power, Invisibility was everywhere, rerollable saves were in full effect, and the whole event in general was straight out of the 40k rulebook (other than the ITC and Nova missions, obviously). We even had to go pick up some tactical cards for a malestorm mission.

Rather than using random swiss parings, players were broken up into brackets for day 1. You only played people in your bracket on the first day, and ITC points were used to seed the brackets. Day 1 basically meant one person from each bracket would advance to the second day undefeated, where they would play each other in their own separate event. Everyone who lost was then shuffled into a loser’s bracket where they played for a second set of prizes using a more normal 3-game swiss pairings.

In attendance was the who’s who of west coast gaming. Steve Sisk, Geoff Robinson, Frankie, Paul Mckelvey, and so on. There were a ton of top-level tournament players, and this definitely was a hyper-competitive event. There were 5 Knight armies, 5 Wraithknight armies, flying circus daemon summoning armies, battle companies, librarius conclaves, space marine thunder wolf ravenwing super-friends, ranged D and invisibility galore, basically any super-nasty list you could think of was represented. Everyone pretty much brought the hardest list they could.

The games:

I’d planned on running my Grey Knights, until the night before I realized I could fit 5 Wraithknights into 1850, and given the nature of the event I just couldn’t say no. I called up a buddy and borrowed the extra WKs I needed, and I was good to go. The list was a minimum Windrider Host, 3 Wraithcannon WKs, and 2 sword and shield WKs. Just barely fits in 1850. I ended up being the only player with 5 Wraithknights, but there was another player with 4, and quite a few other scattered across the tables as well.

Game 1:

My first game was against one of the Left Coast Corsairs, a cool guy who took Sisters, Space Marines, and a Warhound with dual Turbolasers. Mission 1 was straight Kill Points. It turned out to be a very quick game. We deployed across from each other, my opponent won the role to go first. He shot at me, and his turbolasers Str D’d one of my Wraithknights into non-existance, while everything else bounced. I shot back, but failed to roll and 6’s so his Warhound lived. We then repeated this dice-rolling game for several turns, with his Warhound instagibbing one Wraithknight while my return fire whiffed.

Eventually, I chipped his Warhound down (it only has 9 hullpoints). At that point, I had 2 Wraithknights left, but he’d killed off the handful of jetbikes I had, and because he scored so many killpoints and bonus Lord of War points for the wounds he’d done to my Wraithknights, I wasn’t quite able to pull it off. It didn’t help that even after his Warhound died, he kept rolling 6’s on his Adeptus Sororitas Invulnerable saves. I’d shoot my D at his vehicles, St Celestine, remaining 1-sister squads, and every time he’d make his 6++. It really was the game of “who can roll the most 6’s”. When the game finally ended, he pulled out a medium-point victory over me.

Game 2:

This time, I faced up against a Centstar list. 4 Centurions, Draigo, Coteaz, Tigirius, etc. He allied in a Culexus, which he stuck in a fast attack drop pod, and a double-gun Imperial Knight. Everything else was minimum troops.

I deployed my whole army in ruins, and it luckily (for me) was Night Fight turn 1. He Gate of Infinity’d the Centstar close enough to shoot my Wraithknights, but scattered a bit too close towards me. Between 3+ cover and 5+ FNP, the Centstar bounced off one of my Wraithknights. I counterchared with 3 Wraithknights. Unfortunately for my opponent, Invisibility does not stop Stomps. My Wraithknights did a little river-dance, and with so many stomps I eventually rolled a 6. Goodbye Centstar.

In the same turn, I believe I got another lucky 6 shooting at his Imperial Knight, exploding it from across the table. With nothing left but a Culexus and a few min-troops units left, he conceded. The mission had been a Nova mission that ended up not mattering because I won so handily. I’d have had 4 full rounds to grab whatever objectives I wanted, then I’d’ve finished off his last unit for the win. Thanks to Stomp and Str D, this simply wasn’t much of a game.

Game 3:

This time I squared up against a vanilla SM player, with a nothing-too-special bike list in a 4-objective ITC mission. He’d faced a 4 Wraithknight list earlier, and wasn’t looking forward to facing 5. Little did he know that the dice gods were about to bless him like no other.

First, he killed one Wraithknight with Hammer of Wrath. He preemptively charged with a unit of bikes, and with Str 5 Hammer of Wrath, he killed a freakin’ Wraithknight. Then, he Psychic Shrieked an Invisibile Wraithknight, managed to roll a 6 to hit, rolled up 6 wounds, and I failed all but one FNP roll. He then promptly chucked a Krak grenade at me and killed that Wraithknight.

Another psychic shriek killed a third Wraithknight. Grav killed a fourth. He was on a freakin’ roll. With so many bonus points from killing Wraithknights, he was able to win out on objectives. The game was honestly hilarious, the dice rolling was so absurd. Plus, you can’t be mad about losing to a cool guy who looks like Chris Pratt .


Day 2:
With 2 losses, I was definitely headed into the loser’s bracket. Because this counted as a separate event, the losers were allowed to play a different army day 2 (the undefeated players who continued on had to stick to the same list). Since two of my 3 games basically game down to stupid dice-rolling exercises devoid of much tactical thought, and my third game was a hilarious underdog story that should have been a stupid dice-rolling exercise devoid of tactical though, I ditched the 5 Wraithknights. I’d had 3 fun games, and it’d been amusing to pull out 5 Wraithknights, but the list itself hadn’t been any fun for my opponents, and it wasn’t much fun for me either.

Instead, I pulled out the list I’d originally planned to play. Grey Knights with Draigo, a Librarian, a Strike Squad, and two Dreadknights, allied to Tigirius with Centurion, plus an Eldar CAD with an Autarch, two small scatterbike squads, and a Wraithknight. Not the friendliest of lists either, but far nicer than 5 Wraithknights. I’d played exactly one prior game with this army, as I’ve avoided playing the Centstar in the past since it was the same thing every other GK player I’ve ever seen does. For today, though, I thought I’d try it out.

Game 4:

I initially got paired up with a particularly notorious member of a particular game club who has in the past cause some severe sportsmanship issues in the past, including getting extremely aggressive to both myself and several friends of mine to the point of us getting ready for him to start throwing punches. As soon as I saw him across from me, I told him that I wouldn’t play him, then found a TO to tell them I conceded my game. One of the other players saw this and knew the history behind the event, and offered to swap opponents with me. Once we got that worked out, I faced up against a Daemon player who turned out to be a very cool guy and we started playing.

My new opponent had essentially ‘the’ competitive Daemons list. Fateweaver, Belakor, a Tzeentch Daemon Prince, a D-axe Bloodthirster, a Heldrake, a bunker with comms array to hid cultists in, and some horrors to hold objectives. While I do get preferred enemy Daemons on my Grey Knights, this was a bad matchup for me since I didn’t have much anti-flyer and Grav is terrible vs Daemons. We were playing pure maelstrom with 6 objectives, pretty much straight from the book (with a couple of very minor tweaks).

My opponent won the roll for turn 1, and went first. He flew his guys all up in the air, Grim’d the Bloodthirster, then cast Invisibility and promptly Perils’d. Belakor failed his grounding check, and dropped out of the sky within range of my Wraithknight.

I pretty much had to take advantage of the opportunity to kill his Invisibility, so the Wraithknight ran forward. The Dreadknights Shunted to get closer to his home objectives while still being able to back up the Wraithknight vs the D Thirster, and my Centstar shot at said Thirster. He made all his invulnerable saves on the Bloodthirster, but the Wraithknight punted Belakor on the charge.

On his turn, he ran his Bloodthirster at my Wraithknight to try and charge it (I took the D guns, not the close combat D Wraithknight). He also summoned an absurd number of heralds that jumped on objectives. He drew several good malestorm cards and jumped up to about 12 to my 3 points. His Bloodthirster failed the 7” charge, though. I counter-charged with my Wraithknight and both Dreadknights.

His Bloodthirster and my guys sat stuck in combat for a couple turns, with me bouncing off his invulnerable save (yay for absurd invulnerable save abuse from Daemons…) while he did a few random wounds to me. I broke Draigo off from my Centstar to join in the fun. Unfortunately for me, my opponent kept making all his invulnerable saves, even after I used Banishment to drop his save and negate the Grimnoire. He then allocated one attack to each of my models, and rolled a bunch of 6’s. Draigo, one Dreadknight, and my Wraithknight disappeared in one go.

With him up by more than 10pts on tactical objectives, my jetbikes dead from the Heldrake, my footslogging Centurions hanging out on their own, and only one Dreadknight left, I called it. His summoning had hit critical mass, and he had like six heralds running around the board and even more coming. I couldn’t kill enough of his stuff, his Thirster was still kicking, and he was drawing all the good tactical cards. We called it at that. Fun game, a cool guy, and another loss for me.

Game 5:

This time I was paired up with the same Centstar player I’d faced round 2 yesterday. A minor snafu, since normally you don’t face the same opponent twice at tournaments, but neither of us minded (since I wasn’t playing the same 5 Wraithknight list). The mission was another Nova mission, where you to either score all your points at the end of the game, or accumulate points by holding objective mid-game, with the ability to pick three secondary objectives off a list of 10 depending on your opponent. Since I had more scoring board presence than my opponent, I chose to accumulate points, and since he had two single-model detachments (his Imperial Knight and his Culexus), I picked the secondary objectives for killing the Culexus, killing a full detachment, and killing all of his min-troops choices.

Since this was a cent-star mirror match, he won the roll-off and chose to go first. He powered up his Centstar, teleported across the board, and shot my Centstar. I’d deployed such that this put him in charge range of my Wraithknight and both Dreadknights, though. His Tigirius also Perils’d and forgot Invisibility the first time he cast it. His shooting killed everything but two Centurions out of the Centstar, but I then prepared to gang up my whole army on him. My centurions and the rest of my shooting killed a few of his models, and then I charged in. Between all my Str 10 attacks, I killed all but one Centurion and Coteaz on the charge, and then stayed locked in to combat.

He’d also ran up his Imperial Knight (which he’d initially cast Invisibility on), with the hope he’d bait out my Wraithknight. Since I’d ignored it, he took the opportunity to try and kill some troops, which its guns did quite adequately. However, in his combat phase, I kicked the rest of his Centstar to death, then my Wraithknight turned around an rolled a 6 on his Str D to explode the Imperial Knight. With only a few min-troops choices left, my opponent conceded. Poor guy, getting a loss off of Str D/Stomp 6’s repeatedly. He was a cool guy, we chatted about lists for a while. I told him I though his list centered too many points on just the Centstar and the Imperial Knight, and that he just didn’t have enough threats in his list

Game 6:

In my last game I faced up against another local player, a solid grav spam SM bike player with a Librarius conclave with 3 Centurion in a drop pod. The mission was 4-objective ITC. He won the roll to go first, lined up his army, and rushed at me.

I’d lucked out and gotten the Stealth Ruins warlord trait, and the whole board was covered in ruins. His Centurions dropped in and did some damage to my Centstar, but Draigo, Tigirius and two Centurions lived, and none of my ‘Knights were hurt. His invisible Librarius Conclave mini-deathstar ran up in my face. I retaliated by assaulting with Draigo and the Wraithknight, while my Dreadknights went after his bike units.

After several rounds of messy combat against a full-powered invisible unit, I managed to chip the conclave down to a few models, and kill most of his bikes, but he killed my secondary units and finished off my Centstar in exchange. My Wraithknight and Dreadknights ran towards his objectives, where his last bike squad and pair of Librarians joined up. I just managed to kick them to death with my Wraithknight, but after the whole game of chasing around impossible to kill grav units he plinked my Wraithknight to death, and brought both Dreadknights down to one wound. A pair of Storm Talons managed to kill off both Dreadknights turns 6 and 7, until the game ended with almost nothing on the table. I had a unit of Scouts on an objective, he had a drop pod and one Storm Talon. He claimed two objectives to my one, and on turn 7 he was able to pull ahead on maelstrom. A super-close game against a cool guy, and a narrow loss.


Some conclusions:

1. With the notable exception of the aforementioned TFG (who is fortunately banned from a lot of the major tournaments and is pretty notoriously known within the local community), everyone was a cool guy. We had fun, talked about lists, joked about crazy dice rolls, and even when someone 6’d something to death with a Stomp or Str D everyone was still joking and having fun. This is, by far, the most uber-hyper-ultra-hardcore event I’ve ever been to, end everyone was having fun kicking the crap out of each other, even if they were losing. If anyone genuinely thinks that competitive players are a bunch of dicks who try and cheat or abuse each other and are all poor sports and it’s no fun to play against them, then you probably haven’t attended many tournaments. Thanks to the ITC/Frontline and a lot of solid clubs and local communities, the west coast has build up a large, solid gaming community where competitive play and fun are not at all mutually exclusive.

2. With everything allowed, the game was not balanced. Every army/matchup/game I saw revolved around abusing a handful of specific mechanics. Space Marine allies could stack rules on rules while hiding behind invisibility. Everyone could spam and abuse invisibility and/or Str D and/or Stomp. Grav was everywhere. Welfare armies with free upgrades/units were everywhere. If you were an army that couldn’t abuse Invisibility, grav, Str D/Stomp, or spam free stuff, you weren’t winning any games. And of those games, matches were frequently determined by who got first turn and was able to alpha-strike their opponent’s Str D/Invisibility first. Lords of War vs Lords of War came down to who could roll the most 6’s. The game was laughably imbalanced, with a very, very limited number of specific mechanics completely dominating the meta.



3. Within the armies that adequately abused the right game mechanics, there was plenty of skill involved. The players who made mistakes (see deepstriking a Centstar right next to 5 Wraithknights) lost, while the top tournament players mostly were still able to play their way to the top tables. The final game was Steve Sisk vs Geoff Robinson in a very tight game, with Steve pulling it out in the last couple of turns. So, while a large part of the game is certainly down to listbuilding, and a lot of game mechanics come down to plenty of luck (what if your Tigirus fails to roll up Invisbility, or your opponent rolls a bunch of 6’s on his Str D/Stomp?), so long as both players take similarly tough lists and the dice rolls aren’t skewed too much in favor of one player or another, skill will win out.

4. There isn’t as much mission variety as there should be. While the pure-rulebook maelstrom mission kind of fell flat on its face (everyone I talked to pretty much agreed that, yeah, it was too super-random and it mostly came down to drawing the right cards), playing core rulebook, ITC missions, and Nova missions at one even highlighted how stale a lot of the standard mission packs are. All of the ITC missions have modified malestorm, and other than the killpoints one is also a multiple-objective mission (and with increased importance of secondary, killpoints is only half of one of six missions). While it’s a great format with fun missions, all the ITC missions pretty much play exactly the same, and it’s heavily skewed in favor of certain armies (battle companies, for example, while elite armies often can’t win without tabling opponents). Similarly, the Nova missions were fun, but seemed like a complete repeat of each other. These standard tournament packets (ITC, Nova) should mix up their games a little bit and come up with some new missions to spice up the tournament scene. I feel like if you go to a Nova event, you’ll just place a bunch of mostly-identical Nova-style missions, and if you go to an ITC event you’ll just place a bunch of mostly-identical ITC style missions. Both are fun, but it would be much more fun to mix it up. Play a Nova mission, play an ITC mission, play something new and fun and exciting instead of very minor variations of the exact same mission over and over again.



5. The ITC nerfs work. I’m sure you can quibble over the details, but virtually everyone had Invisibility. It got freakin’ old. It wouldn’t have been nearly the problem with the ITC nerf, where it’s a useful but not overpowering ability. Same thing with ranged D, though frankly close combat D and Stomp is far more absurd in a completely unfiltered format than Frontline has claimed in the past. This, however, is probably due to the format allowing LOW spam, along with full-powered Invisibility to deliver said assault LOW into combat. Grav was also a notable problem, as bog-standard grav units, Skyhammer, and Centurions were all able to wreck face even in such a hardcore event right alongside full powered Str D (though again, Centurions greatly benefit from Invisibility).

6. A lot of lesser armies were nowhere to be seen. There were one or two Sisters players, but they only did well when allied to a more powerful force. No one was playing Grey Knights, only Draigo allied to Centurions (there were quite a few Draigos out there, I was the only GK player with so much as a Dreadknight that I saw. And on that note, if you think Dreadknights are OP, you’re probably not a competitive player. They did some decent work for me, but they were nothing compared to the far, far, far, far nastier things out there). CSM was only taken for Belakor and the Heldrake. Etc. The wide spread of armies that has been notable of late at Frontline’s ITC events was nowhere to be seen here. There were a lot of very similar repeat lists

7. Space Marine Super-friends is crazy. A giant deathstar of a bunch of Ravenwing bikes with rerollabel 2+ jink saves, Librarius Conclave for Invisibility and psychic shenanigans, Thunderwolf Iron Priests for assault punch, and so on makes for a giant, neigh invulnerable steamroller that laughs in the face of the fact that technically, Blood Angels/Dark Angels/Space Wolves don’t have “Chapter Tactics” chapter tactics, and thus you can stack basically every USR out there into one big unit.

8. At the end of the day, everyone still had fun. This whole venture was one grand, ambitions experiment and a giant departure from the tournament norm. Even if it, in my opinion, validates a lot of things like the ITC nerfs to Str D, Invis, and rerollable saves, it brought valuable lessons and highlighted some areas for improvement in the tournament norm (in particular, more variety in missions). (Also, standard maelstrom still sucks for competitive play.) But, again, the event as a whole was a blast, and I saw people there having a ton of fun.

Awesome read, thankyou!

Did the event allow Unbound armies as well, or was that a little bit too far?

My tournament area tends to play nearly exclusively by the book, no ITC, no custom missions; about the only change is Battleforged only, and generally Lords of War can only comprise 25% of your army. Even that small change only came about when a Revenant Titan army list stomped its way to effective turn 2 victories 5 games in a row.

I think your point #3 is the most important. The game can be 'balanced' at the ultra-pointy end of mechanics abuse IF no player rolls an undue amount of 6's... thats something I've felts of a long time, and I really don't think its a good state for the game to be in.

Good report, and good to see it was still fun. It's actually good to see that it sorta-almost-CAN work unrestricted.

However, I think point 5 is the telling one - there are a ton of players out there who simply can't play this event because they don't have the right army. Which, of course, makes the field really generic (absence of many armies entirely, multiples of the same list). If I wanted to play in this, I'd have to go out and buy a specific new army just to stand a chance of winning a game!!

Sounds like a lot of fun. If there was a tournament scene like this where I'm at, I'd probably still play (40k is pretty much dead locally )

But I have to echo Arbitor1an, the biggest thing that deters me from the current game is the general lack of parity. It used to be, even lower ranked codices could beat top armies if played right. Now, listbuilding and dice rolling determine too much for my tastes.

Still, I could deal with if the scene is anything like what you've described. (Although Orks and CSM getting a buff wouldn't hurt. )

Great event. Gonna post a few pics. Lots of things to like about this over the LVO.
#1. Varied Missions (ITC, BRB, NOVA - 2 each)
#2. Pairings made sense.
#3. 2day GT with losers in a 1 day RTT on day 2
#4. No draws (series of criteria to determine tie breaker the final being 3 rounds of ro sham Bo..
#5. Calling over a TO: We were instructed to let the judge know whether we wanted a "snap judgement" that would apply only to this game/turn/phase/event OR if we wanted a researched answer, which would apply to all future scenarios in the GT

THANKS Guys. Had a great time

Sounds like a great thing to've done.

Once

This definitely sounds like a well-run event, and I'm glad you had fun OP. The format of the day one brackets mixed with the second day's losers tier intrigues me; I'll have to send this to the guy that runs the tournaments in my area. Hyper-competitive GTs may not be my thing, but the format seems like it could be adapted to less competitive tournaments as well.

As we've all probably suspected, competitive players are no more or less likely to be TFG than casual players. Good to know that some of the posters on this board don't represent the "competitive Mindset" that they claim to.

I definitely agree about the ITC missions giving a serious bonus to objective-focused armies and for playing exactly the same. I can see why some players might like that, but it can get old. I'm surprised that the ITC hasn't taken missions out of the Altar of War book and given them their treatment, just to mix things up with a little asymmetry.

Say what you want about them, but I believe that the ITC FAQ has one of the better-balanced rulesets out there. The nerfs to Invisibility and 2+ re-rollable nerf deathstars, and the nerfs to D and Stomps get rid of the hard counter to deathstars. You end up seeing a lot more variety in people's lists due to searching for new tools and tricks to get around these restrictions.

MVBrandt wrote:
Sounds like a great thing to've done.

It was worth doing. From looking at people's lists, not enough of the player base embraced the opportunities allowed by a wide-open format. It is worth correcting a point made above, every army was represented, and the diversity of armies was not significantly different from a normal ITC event of similar size. Of the 7 brackets, the favored players won 6 of 7 first round matchups, and the final 2 in each bracket included at least 1, and generally both of the top 2 players in every bracket. The usual cast of characters made up the top, as will be the case almost regardless of format.

Since I spoke with every player numerous times, the number of "likes" outweighed the "dislikes" on every issue discussed; however, just simply tipping the balance shouldn't be the goal of a TO. Those that disliked issues, did so more vehemently than in more restricted formats. It is unknown if this is because the format was different from what players were expecting - many didn't look at the mission packet until days before the event; despite it being published for months, or if it was simply a less enjoyable format than they preferred.

I think that additional adjustments could be made for future similar events, including having even more mission diversity.

Awesome report man I really appreciate your opinion on Warhammer and that you don't hold back to give a fair assessment! I think I know who you're talking about btw in terms of the notorious player in question I've had a few run ins with that club too...

Thanks man, it's always good to see you and the other frontline guys around. And, yeah, it's a couple of specific individuals from a specific club, which is unfortunate because there are some other guys in the club who get a bad rap because of the association. Their rep has spread far enough that if you haven't heard of them, you probably don't need to worry about running into them, and since that was just a minor footnote from an otherwise awesome event, I think that's probably enough about that from me.


I think I should clarify, when I said "less diverse" it wasn't so much that few factions were represented. It was more that the format pushed towards everyone abusing certain specific mechanics. It was the classic CSM problem. There are plenty of "CSM" players, but they all just take Belakor, cultists and a heldrake and ally them to something else. You never see actual chaos marines.

That's ultimately what I think the ITC nerfs benefit the most. Instead of every army turning into who can spam str d and invisibility best, it opens the field for less "optimal" options. Not that the ITC nerfs are necessarily the perfect balance, but I think the basic idea behind them improves the tournament. But, we'd never know that if no one ever contested them, so when it comes down to it, it's great that we have some unaltered tournaments in order to say "is this nerf necessary".

One thing I did notice is that playing lots of LOW turns into an almost auto-lose in a lot of missions if you don't table people. Those bonus points for wounds and hullpoints adds up fast. Lose a wraithknight or two, and youve basically lost the primary mission. While it does technically balance things out, I'm not sure if it's the best mechanism for doing so. You end up with a game where the LOW wrecks his opponent, but loses on a technicality. The LOW player gets frustrated for losing even though he dominated the game, and the winner probably didn't have a great game even though he technically won.

No more speculation on the un-named individual who the OP did not play in this event, please... thanks.

Having read this report... I'm glad it was tried, but I can also see why events are adding some restrictions. Who wants to mostly face invisible / Str D / re-rollable invul units all tourney?

Of course, there's no harm at all in an 'Ard Boyz style event like this - it'd even be cool to try out . But it's not a format I expect folks will want to play most of the time in this edition.

Thanks for the write-up DarkLink. Wished I could have gone, but I just took my vaca a couple of weeks just before this.

Yeah, this is what you can kind of expect in an unrestricted format - just a lot of craziness. 40K out of the box just isn't conducive to tournament play, at least not to the newer and more casual players. People will abuse the heck out of the system and then craziness ensues. Now I am not saying that is bad, but for the newer player or the more casual player, he is more likely to have a bad experience and get rofl-stomped especially if he isn't prepared for what an unrestricted format means. It's a good contrast compared to a more conservative tournament format (like the ITC) but I've got to wonder how long an unrestricted tournament can hold the interest of the majority of the players.

 RiTides wrote:
No more speculation on the un-named individual who the OP did not play in this event, please... thanks.

Having read this report... I'm glad it was tried, but I can also see why events are adding some restrictions. Who wants to mostly face invisible / Str D / re-rollable invul units all tourney?

Of course, there's no harm at all in an 'Ard Boyz style event like this - it'd even be cool to try out . But it's not a format I expect folks will want to play most of the time in this edition.

I think more than that, it highlights the biggest frustration in the game today for most people, and that's the abuse of extreme mechanics.

Not everyone has liked any one edition, and spam will never be fully gotten rid of in Warhammer 40,000 I think, but if you look at 5th Edition, one of the hallmarks of that edition was even the "Super" units like Paladin/Draigo stars and Nob Biker units were generally killable. You threw enough bullets at them and they'd fall over. The game needed rules tweaking here or there (i.e. wound allocation), but by and large it was about bringing a solid list and then outplaying the opponent, and you often saw better players bringing things like assault guard blobs (read: not me, I ran mechvets like everyone else, just with Straken for a tweak) or tri-land raider lists and winning GTs. Starting a little in 6th, and now really rampantly right now, the best lists all leverage something ridiculous. You've got thunderstars that can charge the entire board while being invisible with re-rolls all over; you've got centstars; you've got mass pod armies that are 30%+ free; you've got crazy psychic abuse armies; you've got SH spam/abuse. The list goes on, but the point is less about variety (there's a fair bit, honestly), and more about what constitutes a good list and a winning gameplan ... and, far less than before, it's not so much about "Wargame" tactics and more about unit and ability micromanagement + gaming the matchup odds within a given tourney format. There's no dearth of CHALLENGE in the game ... and skilled players are the ones who do best regardless. But it sure feels less like a fun, tactical wargame than it used to. Formats like this are good at highlighting that ... and reinforcing why rules tweaks are more necessary than ever before ... if you'd like a tactics-based wargame, that is.

With so much Grav, I am surprised nobody tried taking multiple void shield formations... Grav does nothing to void shields IIRC and each shield stops a S D shot.

It's hard to fit in a VSG when you've got 5 Wraithknights in your army.

But in all seriousness, the VSG is still a secret/mystery to most people. Then again, the centstar has lost some of its popularity this edition compared to previously.

There wasn't a crazy amount of grav. A few cent stars, several more centurion units with librarius conclave or even on their own, a few bike grav armies, they were there, but not as predominante as other things. Grav hard counters certain specific armies and units, but is worthless against a lot of things. It's extremely rock paper scissors.

I really like this format a lot and am glad to know it was a success. That is the message I got from the OP.

The VSG and Coteaz is the reason I had no chance winning the Kill Points mission Round 1 with my Battle Company. I have 6 grav cannons and 9 meltaguns in my list. I lost 21-5.

I think that first killpoint mission was important in filtering out certain armies. Standard ITC is specifically designed to give a huge advantage to MSU. Throwing a killpoints mission into the mix throws quite a wrench in that, though.

I would have been ok if it wasn't the 1st Round Mission. Knowing that, I would have taken a different army.

I like victory points over kill points and think it's a better indicator.

 Dozer Blades wrote:
I like victory points over kill points and think it's a better indicator.

Aye, it's a far more accurate representation of actual damage inflicting on a force, and doesn't hurt attrition based armies just for showing up.

It also counters the fact that the game's rules make it very difficult to kill MSU. Because you can't split your fire, a significant number of shots tend to go to waste. Since MSU essentially abuses the game mechanics in that sense to become artificially hard to kill, while simultaneously increasing the efficiency of their own firepower because they can split shots between so many different targets, it's important to have some sort of mission that counteracts that advantage, in the same way that it's important to have missions with lots of objectives that is difficult for deathstars to claim.

That's not to say the solution has to be killpoints, but when an event runs a format that, like ITC, gives huge benefits to running MSU in every single mission while implementing strong measures to nerf elite and/or not very mobile armies, it allows people to take skew lists rather than flexible take-all-comers. Every army should have strengths and weaknesses, and the missions need to reflect that. You should have to trade off advantages between missions, e.g. in mission 1, do you want to take an elite army and do well, but suffer in mission 2, or take an MSU army and have a tough time in mission 1 but do well in mission 2, or do you take a more balanced middle-of-the-road army and do ok in both missions but not spectacular in either?


Mission diversity opens up the field, and I feel that's a weakness of the ITC format (and from what little I've played of the Nova format, I think they have a similar issue). I think the best thing KNM GT did was have very diverse missions. The maelstorm mission straight from the rulebook is meh competitively, but it was great to go from Killpoints to 6-objective Scouring with Maelstorm and back again. You had to be good at everything, not just spam a ton of obsec and hang out on objectives or something like that.

I've just always had a problem with kill points. They seem to have been adopted as a sort of MSU balancing mechanism, when they really were a more simple method of victory calculation, but even as a balancing mechanism, they feel so intentionally forced and stilted that it really makes it difficult to enjoy the game a lot of the time, at least for me.

having seen many games end in victory for the side that legitimately got outplayed and is left with a broken and incapable force, just because an opponent's army was made up of lots of discrete elements of maneuver and the other army had very few, is often very frustrating.

That said, I'm also not a huge fan of Maelstrom missions at all either

Not to try and take away from your perceptions or any fun you had at the event, I just like to rant about kill points

 Dozer Blades wrote:
I like victory points over kill points and think it's a better indicator.

How do you handle VP on welfare armies? Specifically those that give you free units?

You'd score for destroyed the free enemy units.

 Dozer Blades wrote:
You'd score for destroyed the free enemy units.

I presume we'd need to have people have point values for their free units, and welfare values for free upgrades listed on army lists then as well. Players have a hard enough doing simple math at tournaments. I could tell you stories about players' abilities to read instructions and perform simple arithmetic....