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 OrlandotheTechnicoloured wrote:
Can you charge 'up' a level in killteam?

It could well be to prevent CC minis having to move to the base of a structure (and get shot), then take a second move to get up it (and get shot again) as they can't pause half way up a wall?

Yes, if you have enough movement to do so. It can ctually be an advantage, as the one on the top often can't see the model charging them, which makes them unable to overwatch in the oncoming charge.

People are over thinking GWs choices.

They play a different game than competitive 40k.

They play rile of cool. They play disproportionate pts values. They play fluffy armies. They don't plan out for the competitive builds that will dominate the scene.

This should be obvious by now. I credit them for at least attempting to bridge the divide.

 frozenwastes wrote:

Vorian wrote:
You're taking an event pack, which is a specific set of rules, and applying it to the core game.

Right, which is what an event pack does. It identifies things in the core game that need changing for the game to work for the event.

The ban on going up is specifically for that pack and so says nothing about the core game because it doesn't apply there.

It says that there's something about vertical movement in the core game that will make the event fail if they allow it. Or they're wrong and they made an event back with a totally needless restriction.

Sure, again, when you implement some of the rules in the pack they feel like you need to ban upward movement.

It's not about fixing the game to work, it's about making the game function in a very specific set of circumstances.

People are over thinking GWs choices.

They play a different game than competitive 40k.

They play rule of cool. They play disproportionate pts values. They play fluffy armies. Just look at the builds they showcase. They figure everyone wants a mix of shooting and CC. They don't plan out for the competitive builds that will dominate the scene.

This should be obvious by now that GW plays a different type of game. It takes the competitive voice to point out certain things that they just wouldn't occur to think. I credit them for at least attempting to bridge the divide.

Essentially it boils down to the notion that with how short the game is, it's all too easy to deploy in a high building and be effectively immune to most melee while also gaining a great LoS position, and since LoS is 'any part of the model' you can easily shoot at the entire board with most terrain set ups.
Let me do a walkthrough.
A fighter deploys 6" in, the general max.
Your opponent deploys 2 levels up in a ruin, 6" in.
So, to reach that opponents model, assuming your playing widthwise...
You need to travel
10", plus the 12" for vertical. Even if you run, for most armies thats a solid 22" (or 3 turns before a desirable charge can be had.)
This is also likely to leave your fighter isolated, not obscured and within range of enemy double tap/ flame pain. He also will not contribute to the fight in those turns.
Meanwhile, ruin-boi is popping off one or more of your fighters a turn.
(the old GW ones were 3" tall, not sure about the new ones).

And after all that, saying you do get those results, there's a significant chance the game could be over next turn.



Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Nightlord1987 wrote:
People are over thinking GWs choices.

They play a different game than competitive 40k.

They play rule of cool. They play disproportionate pts values. They play fluffy armies. Just look at the builds they showcase. They figure everyone wants a mix of shooting and CC. They don't plan out for the competitive builds that will dominate the scene.

This should be obvious by now that GW plays a different type of game. It takes the competitive voice to point out certain things that they just wouldn't occur to think. I credit them for at least attempting to bridge the divide.

You don't get to tell me your selling a banana, tell me about the banana, take my money for the banana and then hand me a god-darn apple.

Neronoxx wrote:
Essentially it boils down to the notion that with how short the game is, it's all too easy to deploy in a high building and be effectively immune to most melee while also gaining a great LoS position, and since LoS is 'any part of the model' you can easily shoot at the entire board with most terrain set ups.
Let me do a walkthrough.
A fighter deploys 6" in, the general max.
Your opponent deploys 2 levels up in a ruin, 6" in.
So, to reach that opponents model, assuming your playing widthwise...
You need to travel
10", plus the 12" for vertical. Even if you run, for most armies thats a solid 22" (or 3 turns before a desirable charge can be had.)
This is also likely to leave your fighter isolated, not obscured and within range of enemy double tap/ flame pain. He also will not contribute to the fight in those turns.
Meanwhile, ruin-boi is popping off one or more of your fighters a turn.
(the old GW ones were 3" tall, not sure about the new ones).

And after all that, saying you do get those results, there's a significant chance the game could be over next turn.

So why not just ban deploying in upper floors?

*equips Reivers with Grapnel launchers*
*whispers "I'm Batman" at random points during the game*

Nightlord1987 wrote:People are over thinking GWs choices.

They play a different game than competitive 40k.

They play rile of cool. They play disproportionate pts values. They play fluffy armies. They don't plan out for the competitive builds that will dominate the scene.

This should be obvious by now. I credit them for at least attempting to bridge the divide.

You forgot one. They don't need to win. They can have fun and still loose and enjoy the game and experience.

Nostromodamus wrote:I think the 4 turn limit and potentially having to cross the table and climb a high ruin might be more likely contributing factors to the 2” rule rather than some grand conspiracy that the game is innately broken by the very terrain it’s packaged with...

It's no grand conspiracy if they just messed up.

It's also not a grand conspiracy that this release is about the new terrain. They did it with SW:A and the Sector Mechanicus stuff and saw the potential for bundling kill team with the new terrain and went for it.

It's totally believable that GW just didn't playtest it enough on the new terrain to spot the problems that elevation can cause. They have less than 50 volunteer playtesters for matched play 40k. Worldwide. How many playtest games of Kill Team do people really think happened? More than 40k or less? It's likely much less and likely by a closed group of individuals who approach the game in a more narrative fashion who simply didn't try to break things to the maximum degree possible.

Then someone with a competitive mindset got a hold of things and put in restrictions like 2" vertical movement that basically contradict the characteristics of the very terrain the core game comes with.

No grand conspiracy, just a product line with conflicted goals getting sorted out with an event pack.

I played my first game today.

Honestly I get what people are saying about the terrain being a bit of an issue as the height of the tall buildings are 5". Honestly though i did two charges at people in buildings and both were successful so don't really see the issue.

The game played way too fast. Played the boxed kill teams and it wasn't till turn 3 when we started getting flesh wounds all early shots were all kills. And it was an almost all shooting game.

The charge/ fight stage I didn't get at all. We had this whole multi charge stuff going on and i don't know if we played it right or not.
-His turn he declares a charge with his leader to my leader, i over watch and cause a flesh wound. Then he charges a second trooper at the opposite side. (no over watch can be taken as I understand on that charge). A 3rd and 4th model attempted to charge my leader but can't overwatch. So my turn for charge and I charge his leader with one of my troops.

He has initiative an then kills my leader with his. I go to another trooper i charge else where. So even though my leader is dead he piled in his model that charged my leader killing my other charger before he got to attack. No clue if we played that right. But the whole, charge, fight, pile in thing is confusing as all hell.

The game was close, played fast for us having to look a lot up. Still have no clue what a shaken model does, i guess they just stay there, can't move can't shoot, can't charge and cant fight back, or retreat in combat? So basically are they just dead in the water?

Honestly the game was fun, i bet it plays faster when you learn it more. The tactic cards were extensive and the game was a lot to focus on without everything else.

Overall I would give it a B-, or maybe a 7 out of 10. Necromunda's game play is a lot more solid.

 Scott-S6 wrote:
Tau and Necrons are shown in a trenches kill zone in the faction focus.

If they get trench combat terrain piece sprues in their box sets I may have to pick one up (might actually get the corresponding Kill Zone box as well, if the stuff inside ends up being any good)

Just use the tournament standard.....doesnt matter how the terrain is modeled....every floor is simply 3" up. I dont care if you are 12" up on top of a cathedral, if the only floor below you is the ground floor, you are 3" up for movement. Done

 Crimson wrote:

So why not just ban deploying in upper floors?

Because reivers and models with fly can zip straight up there.

I think the problem is more about long range shooting being overly dominant from the tops of ruins when the terrain is far too sparse (which is what I see in those maps).


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 skoffs wrote:

 Scott-S6 wrote:
Tau and Necrons are shown in a trenches kill zone in the faction focus.

If they get trench combat terrain piece sprues in their box sets I may have to pick one up (might actually get the corresponding Kill Zone box as well, if the stuff inside ends up being any good)

The wall of martyrs terrain is okay, not great.

 Scott-S6 wrote:

 skoffs wrote:

 Scott-S6 wrote:
Tau and Necrons are shown in a trenches kill zone in the faction focus.

If they get trench combat terrain piece sprues in their box sets I may have to pick one up (might actually get the corresponding Kill Zone box as well, if the stuff inside ends up being any good)

The wall of martyrs terrain is okay, not great.

Give Bunker, pls.

More terrain to los block up and down. Sure be at 5" height. Then you won't see guy approaching yfu at ground levei

So if there really is an issue with the interaction between the rules and the scenery, is it possible that Rouge Trader was the original planned Kill Team starter?

The success of SWA led to them looking to repeat it by taking the Kill Team rules and making a SWA style starter from them?

From the games I have played I could see it playing better in the confined zone mortals style environment of Rouge Trader.

I'm looking forward to trying it on my zone mortalis board.

All of this assumption that because nova made a call that somehow the game itself is less or intended differently is. Insane. Its a tournament circuit or whatever they make arbitrary rules decisions based on their needs and kneejerk reaction. I can almost guarantee they made this bunk call based on the likelihood of an organizer actually supplying an appropriate amount of terrain for a kill team event. Does it make me assume kill team was meant to be something else or split philosophies for how the game is supposed to work vs how terrain is supposed to work blah blah blah.

Nova is an independent body that seems to have helped playtest. They made a call, gw is supporting them by slapping their name on it to promote kill team, and a bunch of people are frankly a tinfoil hat away from screaming aliens. This is not "THE (trademark) official" kill team format, this is a rules packet designed for the very first large event to run this system. I will not be using this rules packet and it makes me not want to attend events that will be using it. That's good because I don't have to waste money and time playing on a nearly empty table, I have that warning now. We will see what happens as time progresses but just calm down folks with your conspiracy theories and hooha. Play some damn kill team and lets just enjoy it while its hot

I don't do those events, kill team for me is about campaigns, so it doesn't bother me as such.

But this height thing has me bemused. I look at the terrain I would put out and wonder how someone camping 'A' high spot can dominate. I see lots of high spots, walkways going all round. every one can go high if they want. Then I wonder how they can see everything and guard the objectives, Really? Are others playing with 1 tower and an otherwise empty board?

I can't help but think that the argument that height is somehow breaking the game are confusing not having enough terrain with height problems.

I'm actually attending NOVA and playing in one of the KT tournaments. At first, the 'no terrain greater than 2" ' rule was pretty perplexing to me. After thinking about it though, I feel like since there are so few models that can essentially ignore vertical terrain (Reivers w/ grapnel launchers and stealth suits, anything else?), this could just be a method of balancing that out. At least I found out about it before less than a week out. I don't mind it too much.

The thing that bugs me the most is the approved pre-game list tailoring, er, roster building. I don't like list tailoring for anyone at anytime, so this just bugs me and removes some of the skill required to play the force you've brought.

Just my 2 cents though. YMMV.

SeanDrake wrote:
So if there really is an issue with the interaction between the rules and the scenery, is it possible that Rouge Trader was the original planned Kill Team starter?

The success of SWA led to them looking to repeat it by taking the Kill Team rules and making a SWA style starter from them?

From the games I have played I could see it playing better in the confined zone mortals style environment of Rouge Trader.

Well, looking at how the miniatures are based in the early pictures it is obvious that they were not built to be deployed on an interior starship map. Unless that was some sort of hydroponics ship.

 godswildcard wrote:

The thing that bugs me the most is the approved pre-game list tailoring, er, roster building. I don't like list tailoring for anyone at anytime, so this just bugs me and removes some of the skill required to play the force you've brought.

That's not a nova thing, it's part of the core rules.

Tailoring for the mission and enemy faction reduces the number of games being decided by matchup.

 Scott-S6 wrote:

 godswildcard wrote:

The thing that bugs me the most is the approved pre-game list tailoring, er, roster building. I don't like list tailoring for anyone at anytime, so this just bugs me and removes some of the skill required to play the force you've brought.

That's not a nova thing, it's part of the core rules.

Tailoring for the mission and enemy faction reduces the number of games being decided by matchup.

Exactly. I can confirm that many armies operate very differently versus other armies. While Deathwatch, Grey Knights, Thousand Sons, and Harlequin armies might be the same from game to game, armies like Tyranids, Orks, Adeptus Astartes, Necron, Tau, and even Death Guard will want to change up their strategy based on who they are fighting. A Tyranid army that faces a Deathwatch army is going to look very different than a Tyranid army that faces an Ork army. If you took the Deathwatch-countering Tyranid list against the Ork army, the Tyranids would have a huge disadvantage.

In other words, there's fewer 'all comers' lists in Kill Team because of the rock-paper-scissors system of elite melee, elite shooting, balanced melee, balanced shooting, horde melee, and horde shooting that they have in the game.

The Campaign system in Kill Team straight up encourages this sort of thing by having people build their 'Command Roster' that's their collection of models, and making their Kill Teams based on the mission/opponent that they're facing. It's thematic, too. You would absolutely take a Sniper on a mission where you have to assassinate an enemy leader, but that might not be as important when the goal is to race to the other side of the board. An actual squad of elite soldiers would change up their tactics based on who they face and where they're going. In other words, not only is the 'list-tailoring' part of the gameplay, but it's fluffy, too.

 Scott-S6 wrote:

 godswildcard wrote:

The thing that bugs me the most is the approved pre-game list tailoring, er, roster building. I don't like list tailoring for anyone at anytime, so this just bugs me and removes some of the skill required to play the force you've brought.

That's not a nova thing, it's part of the core rules.

Tailoring for the mission and enemy faction reduces the number of games being decided by matchup.

That’s not quite right. The core rules allow you to tailor your list after the mission has been determined, but not necessarily before your opponent has been chosen. For a tournament environment, this would allow you to submit different Kill Teams based on the missions in the tournament packet but before your opponent has been assigned to you. It’s a small, but important, distinction I feel.

IMO, list tailoring is never good, and I feel like it hamstrings certain armies more than difficult matchups ever will. I felt originally that Kill Team would be a good option for making take-on-all-comers army list that have pretty much disappeared in favor of spam in the tournament scene, but I feel that allowing tailoring to your opponent will dissuade this approach in favor of spamming as many options specifically good against your enemy as you can.


Edit:

drbored wrote:

 Scott-S6 wrote:

 godswildcard wrote:

The thing that bugs me the most is the approved pre-game list tailoring, er, roster building. I don't like list tailoring for anyone at anytime, so this just bugs me and removes some of the skill required to play the force you've brought.

That's not a nova thing, it's part of the core rules.

Tailoring for the mission and enemy faction reduces the number of games being decided by matchup.

Exactly. I can confirm that many armies operate very differently versus other armies. While Deathwatch, Grey Knights, Thousand Sons, and Harlequin armies might be the same from game to game, armies like Tyranids, Orks, Adeptus Astartes, Necron, Tau, and even Death Guard will want to change up their strategy based on who they are fighting. A Tyranid army that faces a Deathwatch army is going to look very different than a Tyranid army that faces an Ork army. If you took the Deathwatch-countering Tyranid list against the Ork army, the Tyranids would have a huge disadvantage.

In other words, there's fewer 'all comers' lists in Kill Team because of the rock-paper-scissors system of elite melee, elite shooting, balanced melee, balanced shooting, horde melee, and horde shooting that they have in the game.

The Campaign system in Kill Team straight up encourages this sort of thing by having people build their 'Command Roster' that's their collection of models, and making their Kill Teams based on the mission/opponent that they're facing. It's thematic, too. You would absolutely take a Sniper on a mission where you have to assassinate an enemy leader, but that might not be as important when the goal is to race to the other side of the board. An actual squad of elite soldiers would change up their tactics based on who they face and where they're going. In other words, not only is the 'list-tailoring' part of the gameplay, but it's fluffy, too.

The examples you give above are exclusive to the type of mission, not the enemy, which the rules already allow. If you were playing in a campaign against a Tyranid player and only a Tyranid player, then you would tailor to them and they to you, which is fluffy based on the background of the campaign you're playing. But say you're recreating The Fall of Medusa V, where pretty much every race is fighting and contesting a single planet, you wouldn't be able to specifically tailor your forces to any one opponent. While you could certainly choose your force based on the mission needing to be accomplished, as you gave examples of, you couldn't say 'we will certainly be fighting X and only X, so there is no need to bring weapon C.' You would be forced to say our mission is this, and we may run into enemy forces X, Y or Z, so we need to ensure we're prepared for all of those threats and plan accordingly. I feel that this type of scenario represents a tournament environment better due to the changing nature of enemy forces, rather than, say, a game with a friend who plays Orks. In the example you gave with the Deathwatch-countering Nid army going against Orks, yes, if they were tooled against DW they would be disadvantaged, but if they were tooled against most threat types, they wouldn't have any more advantage then the Orks. Using the same example, maybe the Nids have better tools they could specifically bring against Orks then the Orks can bring against Nids (certainly true in regular 40K atm) so by allowing the Nids to tailor to the Orks, which the Orks can't do as well in return, you've disadvantaged the Orks before the game started.

But, this is all my opinion, and I recognize I very well may be in the minority. I actually think the game benefits from not necessitating that every army be able to compete on an even playing field with every other army. I prefer TOAC lists, which very well may explain why I pretty much always compete for last place in most tournaments I go to!

 godswildcard wrote:

That’s not quite right. The core rules allow you to tailor your list after the mission has been determined, but not necessarily before your opponent has been chosen. For a tournament environment, this would allow you to submit different Kill Teams based on the missions in the tournament packet but before your opponent has been assigned to you. It’s a small, but important, distinction I feel.

The core rules have mission selection as something the two players do together so obviously you know who your opponent is. Each player also has a roster prepared before choosing the mission.

It doesn't say either way if each player should reveal their selected faction or command roster before mission selection or kill team selection but a lot of players seem to be assuming that faction is open information and the nova pack would certainly seem to support that but we'll need a FAQ to confirm.

There at plenty of games that use this kind of force selection and it works very well in low model count games.

Plus, your total roster is limited to 20 in competitive play, and there are a lot of factions to play against. You can only tailor so many models to a particular enemy before you lose out against other enemies, so you still need to create a TAC roster. You can just tweak it for specific missions and enemies.

Whoops, didn’t realize I was responding a few days too late.

Requiet wrote:
All of this assumption that because nova made a call that somehow the game itself is less or intended differently is. Insane.

Who made the call? Isn't the document hosted on a GW website?

split philosophies for how the game is supposed to work vs how terrain is supposed to work blah blah blah.

Do you think the playtesters had access to the terrain or used their existing collection? There's no conspiracy here, just a very high likelyhood that the playtesters did not test the game experience as it is out of the box with the new terrain.

frankly a tinfoil hat away from screaming aliens.

Since AoS 2.0 came out GW has had to faq away Lord Kroak, Anvils of Heldenhammer, Spell Portals and more. Their internal playtesting and even their external playtesting can never be good enough to catch what competitive minded players come up with.

The real crazy tin foil hat idea would be that Kill Team came out and would require no changes for the competitive environment. GW simply doesn't test enough for that to be the case even for their main games of 40k and AoS. Even 40k is having matched play formations no longer able to be based on faction keywords like Imperium.

Cookoo-town is thinking GW gets it right before publication.

Now that I've had a chance to play four games, I think the assessment that elevation can dominate the game is bang on. And when you play a campaign and units already good at shooting from elevation get even better, it's going to be an ever starker issue.

Kill Team seems like a great set of rules for Zone Mortalis. The included terrain, less so. The windows that are normally high enough that models can hide beneat them suddenly allow a model with elevation to ignore so much of the terrain.

Go try it. Try staying on the ground and fighting and then try dominating the high ground and shooting down. One is clearly more powerful of an approach and given the terrain included in the box, makes for a bad game experience for the other player. Who will then also go for the high ground where possible and then many scenarios become far more biased towards the defender.

I'm more confident than ever that the bulk of the playtesting was done on some other type of terrain. Maybe people used their necromunda tiles or something.

I would recommend everyone who wants to use the included terrain for kill team to convert your buildings to have boarded up, plated over or bricked in windows for a solid half of the windows on the terrain. Your games will improve remarkably.

Frozenwastes; why aren’t you complaining that all of the dozen other changes NOVA is making for their tournament clearly show that the base game is broken beyond belief?

Is it because you haven’t actually read the NOVA rules pack and have no idea what other changes were made? Because it certainly seems like it from here.

Played a 3 way game of KT this weekend on a Zone Mortalis board, we had a good time and finished in 2 hours even though all of us were learning the game as we went. Necrons, Chaos Marines, and myself playing IG.

We had a good time, everyone enjoyed it, the game played well and we didn't have any real complaints. The game ended with each of us controlling an objective and one unclaimed objective. Necron player ended up winning due to the list point tie breaker as he and I had 8 victory points with the Chaos player only having 4. Not sure about the whole height discussion since we used a Zone Mortalis board but the 4 turn game length restriction may change the meta a bit I think, our game went to turn 5 and that last turn accounted for close to half the over all model kills in the game and even then all of us were above 50% casualties. But it was just one game and all of us had better than average luck with only taking flesh wounds.