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So far my 8th edition games with end game scoring for objectives has been pretty disappointing. The flow of the battles was more stagnant, less exciting, and less "kinetic" for lack of a better word. Scenarios that encouraged mobility, such as maelstrom and ITC missions were much more interesting. What has your experience been? Is there any reason to play a standard mission with end game objective scoring?

yes. eternal war is terrible. I suggest playing any of the many available tournament/narrative missions or maelstrom before doing eternal war.

Do not play end game scoring.

The game is so much better with non-random objectives and in-game scoring and frankly half the disagreements on this forum probably stem from the gulf in experiences.

It didn't take long for me to stop playing the rule books eternal war missions. Chapter approved has at least one good one that isn't end scoring tho.

Depends do you want your games be gunline who wipes opponents army first games

Chapter Approved has 10 good non-end game missions.

To me, you'd determine who won a battle at the end, not partway through based on who sat on which objective for a turn before blowing up a flyer, who then killed a psyker, who then activated Psychic powers...

So to me, the Maelstrom missions always seemed premature. In Warmachine, it kind of makes sense. They're forcing you into the middle where big robots are gonna smash each other. It's the focus of the game, so their gameplay encourages that. For me, Maelstrom / non-end-of-game scoring defeats any kind of long term plan [which I use loosely in 8th...] that I might have had at the beginning of the game. It penalizes slow moving troops in a profound way, that makes any non-12" moving infantry borderline useless. You win by scoring points before your opponent, or by getting a certain point value ahead of your opponent.

For me, mid-game scoring is immersion breaking. No battle plan, just randomly run all over the map and kill random things and aw crap, I spent all game walking to objective 6 and now I've drawn objective 1 again. I get that some people like it. It's changing, never the same game twice kind of thing, but it just doesn't do it for me.

Mid-game scoring =/= maelstrom trash. You can have cumulative objectives using the conventional fixed objective system, you just score 1 VP for each objective you hold at the end of each turn.

(Now, I'm not convinced about mid-game scoring in general, but it's important to separate legitimate and reasonably designed systems from the idiocy of maelstrom objectives.)

ITC missions are worth playing.

I generally steer clear of all GW missions.

End of game scoring makes even less sense when most games are clearly decided by turn 4. "Do we need to play this out?" is a phrase you should practice when playing end of game scoring.

End game scoring is necessary for the game, but not as the standard mission, just as a kind of mission you could possibly play. If you know that your games will include:

- Kill points
- Maelstrom
- Progressive scoring
- End game scoring

You will have to bring lists that are capable of tackling any possible scenario.

In this CA missions nailed it. Just be sure to never come to a game knowing which one the mission will be, always roll for it

There are even 2 missions in CA which force you play with only a part of your list for a couple of turns, which really makes you think how to make a list.

Maelstrom has always worked fine for me and my group. Over hundreds of games played I don't think there's been a situation where one player has been completely screwed by the card draw to the point where they couldn't win the game. Having fluctuating mission parameters makes the game more interesting for me and I prefer something that you can't 100% build around for adding a little bit of uncertainty to the game.

Eternal War missions have always been terrible, IMO. They tend to promote static, dull games. I do wish GW would introduce more variety in their missions though. Something that alters how deployment works, for example. Anything that forces you to think on your feet more and not be able to default to a standard method of deployment/first turn play would be a welcome improvement.

Yeah don't use exclusively endgame scoring.

If you don't mind the occasional lopsided match, maelstrom is fine. Just remember it is possible to lose without a real chance due to bad draws.
Also I would highly recommend this house rule: If an objectve is physically impossible discrard it and generate a new one. Note does this not mean hard. So t'au don't get to do it for drawinf a melee objective but they would get to do it for "manifest X psychic powers".

Also the open war card deck is fantastic for generating variety in your games. But once again the caveat: you have to accept the occasional lopsided game. Sometimes the random draw will screw you over.

 Earth127 wrote:
But once again the caveat: you have to accept the occasional lopsided game. Sometimes the random draw will screw you over.

This is one of the reasons why maelstrom is trash.

So t'au don't get to do it for drawinf a melee objective but they would get to do it for "manifest X psychic powers".

And this is another one. It's stupid to give credit for things like "charge a unit" that are just basic parts of playing the game. Either they're part of your strategy or they aren't, and you shouldn't be rewarded or penalized for the method you chose for winning the game. Playing with this kind of stuff makes it less of a serious wargame and more of an exercise in doing what the cards tell you to do, no matter how self-destructive or pointless it is.

Irrelevant, because games always end in tabling. At least in my experience!

Stux wrote:
Irrelevant, because games always end in tabling. At least in my experience!

Depends on the local meta, here we resolve it by scenario points 60% of times.

Have a liking for the open war deck as a mission generator here personally, I think the cure for the end game scoring though is to have a wide range of missions with a range of different scoring types and points during the game

 greatbigtree wrote:
To me, you'd determine who won a battle at the end, not partway through based on who sat on which objective for a turn before blowing up a flyer, who then killed a psyker, who then activated Psychic powers...

So to me, the Maelstrom missions always seemed premature. In Warmachine, it kind of makes sense. They're forcing you into the middle where big robots are gonna smash each other. It's the focus of the game, so their gameplay encourages that. For me, Maelstrom / non-end-of-game scoring defeats any kind of long term plan [which I use loosely in 8th...] that I might have had at the beginning of the game. It penalizes slow moving troops in a profound way, that makes any non-12" moving infantry borderline useless. You win by scoring points before your opponent, or by getting a certain point value ahead of your opponent.

For me, mid-game scoring is immersion breaking. No battle plan, just randomly run all over the map and kill random things and aw crap, I spent all game walking to objective 6 and now I've drawn objective 1 again. I get that some people like it. It's changing, never the same game twice kind of thing, but it just doesn't do it for me.

Not all battles focus around obliterating enemy forces - there are numbers possible scenarios in which precise strikes, extraction, scouting, marking etc are more important for the overall war than straight up slaughter. And for this, mid-game scoring makes much more sense tyan end game scoring. One condition needs to be met however, for such scenarios to not devolve into "no matter anyway because tabling" - that tabling is only a slight bonus, not a guaranteed best outcome.

And GW original Maelstrom cards (especially supremacy set from 7th) are perfectly fine tool (with just a couple of slight tweaks) for creating all sorts of custom scenarios. Coupled with Open War cards they provide pretty much unlimited variation to the game. All it takes is some open mind and basic social skills to utilise those and never look back on Eternal War.

Biggest flaw of Eternal War style missions is their solvability up-front which emphasises listbuilding stage and pre-planned combos (as in "at the comfort of your home", not as in "during pre-battle/deployment sequence at the a actual table")

End game scoring isn't focussed on strictly obliterating.

Precision Strike - Makes sense to eliminate key units from your opponent's army, so you can achieve your objectives. To be fair, a precision strike type objective is exactly focussing on obliterating something. Do you need to score extra points for eliminating a key threat? It's something you'd do anyway, but Player 2 gets points for doing so and Player 1 doesn't?

Extraction - Control the landing pad *at the end of the game* when the evac shows up.

Scouting - Hard to properly explore / investigate something while you're being shot at. That's the kind of thing you'd want to do after a battle, when bombs aren't going off around you. Control an objective when the fighting stops, and you can scout at leisure.

Marking - Um... I don't know what to do with this one. Should being aware of what your opponent brought give you victory points?


Would a real army gain "victory points" for holding a strategic location for 5 minutes? I don't think so. I think if you are going after a strategic location it would be to take an hold it until after the battle is over. That's what breaks the immersion for me. One side gets points for random, arbitrary goals that either would normally happen anyway in an Eternal War mission [like launching an assault, casting a psychic power, bringing down a flyer, passing a Ld test, any of the non-obj holding goals] or you get them before the end of the game for holding objectives, which doesn't make sense to me as the "end of the battle" is when you determine the results of your efforts, not in the middle.

For me, end of game scoring creates a problem to solve, and my efforts to resolve the problem over a series of turns shows whether or not I've successfully solved the problem [by winning] or not [by losing / draw]. It puts me in the role of Commander, where I determine how to achieve the objectives I've decided to achieve.

Maelstrom in particular, and to a lesser extent mid-game scoring in general, feels like I'm not the Commander. It makes me feel more like a Sergeant with an incompetent Commander, issuing me non-sensical orders to achieve. Instead of a problem to solve, it's random actions to achieve. Or achieve actions I would anyway, if I were the person in charge of the plan.

I can appreciate that it seems more active, but most of the time you're getting points for things you'd do anyway. It may seem boring to other people, but I find a new challenge and a new problem to solve in every Eternal War type mission I've ever played. I admit that 40k isn't exactly the best measure of testing one's abilities against their opponent's, but it's the game my friends and I have played forever, so that's what I play.

 greatbigtree wrote:

Would a real army gain "victory points" for holding a strategic location for 5 minutes? I don't think so. I think if you are going after a strategic location it would be to take an hold it until after the battle is over.

That kinda depends on the narrative. Perhaps the mission is to secure datascores and download the information to the orbiting cruiser? Longer you hold the datacore, more time you have to download.

Though I have to agree that the Maelstrom cards are a tad too random, and objectives that are just completing basic actions are lame. But in general I appreciate mission where the victory can be achieved in other ways than just killing everything. In my earlier example it ultimately would not matter if the forces sent to retrieve the data were eventually killed to the last trooper, as long as they managed to download the crucial information before that.

 Marmatag wrote:
ITC missions are worth playing.

Only if you want games that reward gameplay completely unintended by the designers of the game.

The issue rises wehn either in an over analysed meta or an old friend group the "problems" have all been solved.
I'd want new and unexpected.

As to your immersion. The first victim of any fight is the plan. you and your opponent boith being after the same objectives exactly and knowiung this well beforehand? Happens but it is rare.

On a practical note. If you don't know what is optimal beforehand creating specialised "kill" lists is harder.

End of game scoring doesn't seem crazy as an idea, but it's a problem that in a lot of actual games of 8th the best way to win with end of game scoring is to ignore the objectives entirely.

People noticed very early on that this is a very deadly edition. This is often even more true for casual lists than for tournament lists, which do sometimes focus on being very durable. It is pretty rare that both armies have a significant board presence left by the end of turn 5. If you do something with a unit on turns 1 through 4 which is not aimed at killing as much of the enemy as possible, you are probably doing it wrong. Typically the winner is just the one left standing, or very rarely it makes sense to move some units around a bit on turn 5.

That said, lots of Maelstrom games are also actually about tabling the other guy. To some extent the Maelstrom objectives are traps, where going out of your way to accomplish one early on can lose you the game. My favorite is probably Contact Lost -- I think that's the one where you draw new cards each turn equal to the number of objectives you control -- since it gives you more reason to try to take territory early, but even with this one the best strategy is often to concentrate on killing as much as you can.

Progressive scoring is where it's at.

I got bored of end game scoring real fast,

I would rather play Maelstrom over Eternal War, and my group has begun experimenting with ITC missions.

 greatbigtree wrote:
End game scoring isn't focussed on strictly obliterating.

Precision Strike - Makes sense to eliminate key units from your opponent's army, so you can achieve your objectives. To be fair, a precision strike type objective is exactly focussing on obliterating something. Do you need to score extra points for eliminating a key threat? It's something you'd do anyway, but Player 2 gets points for doing so and Player 1 doesn't?

Extraction - Control the landing pad *at the end of the game* when the evac shows up.

Scouting - Hard to properly explore / investigate something while you're being shot at. That's the kind of thing you'd want to do after a battle, when bombs aren't going off around you. Control an objective when the fighting stops, and you can scout at leisure.

Marking - Um... I don't know what to do with this one. Should being aware of what your opponent brought give you victory points?


Would a real army gain "victory points" for holding a strategic location for 5 minutes? I don't think so. I think if you are going after a strategic location it would be to take an hold it until after the battle is over. That's what breaks the immersion for me. One side gets points for random, arbitrary goals that either would normally happen anyway in an Eternal War mission [like launching an assault, casting a psychic power, bringing down a flyer, passing a Ld test, any of the non-obj holding goals] or you get them before the end of the game for holding objectives, which doesn't make sense to me as the "end of the battle" is when you determine the results of your efforts, not in the middle.

For me, end of game scoring creates a problem to solve, and my efforts to resolve the problem over a series of turns shows whether or not I've successfully solved the problem [by winning] or not [by losing / draw]. It puts me in the role of Commander, where I determine how to achieve the objectives I've decided to achieve.

Maelstrom in particular, and to a lesser extent mid-game scoring in general, feels like I'm not the Commander. It makes me feel more like a Sergeant with an incompetent Commander, issuing me non-sensical orders to achieve. Instead of a problem to solve, it's random actions to achieve. Or achieve actions I would anyway, if I were the person in charge of the plan.

I can appreciate that it seems more active, but most of the time you're getting points for things you'd do anyway. It may seem boring to other people, but I find a new challenge and a new problem to solve in every Eternal War type mission I've ever played. I admit that 40k isn't exactly the best measure of testing one's abilities against their opponent's, but it's the game my friends and I have played forever, so that's what I play.

I realise, that I might have been not precise enough in my previous post: Maelstrom CARDS are a great tool, not GW "as written" Maelstrom RULES. I find them so flexible, that depending on exact drawing conditions, they may be used to create a whole spectrum of possible scenarios, including end game goals, mid game goals, "sudden death" type of loopsided scenarios etc... Of course, some of those narratives could be "squeezed in" Eternal War style of end game scoring, but those simply always feels the same, no matter what narrative you asign to any given EW scenario. With Maelstrom cards however, you can prepare, e.g., a thematic set of equally valued "hands" of different objectives to each player and easily have a unique game right away. With EW missions you pretty much cannot play a "suicide run" type of game, when one side will most certainly end up tabled but still win because of achieving specific goals (a scenarios very common in real-life warefare, even in modern conflict zones).

There is also one other difference between EW and carefully prepared non-stock Maelstrom. In EW the whole army often feels like a one, big single unit fighting unisono, while in Maelstrom games more often feel like a concerto of coordinated but distinct units fighting their own skirmishes to achieve a common goal. It seems like you and I differ exactly on this aspect - I like this independency of units, where a single trooper might win the day, you like the feel of mastermind general with everything going according to plan.

But I should probably add one important thing: I play in a very small group of people and we seek variety not by playing same lists against different people and different armies, but by playing against different lists in different scenarios with same people. We have hundreds of games played together under our belts and no two have ever felt the same once we ditched EW. It isn't a style that can be easily adapted to pickup games, because we often balance our games by playing scenarios twice or even four times in a row in some cases, totaling scores of such multimatches. So I'm not arguing that my way is anyhow superior to others, only that 40k comes with some very nice tools to go "sideways" to Matched Play EW.

The Chapter Approved mission Targets of Opportunity is the most fun I have had by far.

Stux wrote:
Irrelevant, because games always end in tabling. At least in my experience!

I think you should play ITC and report back. You might be surprised.

Why so? It's very realistic. Obviously, the army that claims the objective once the dust settles is the winner, not the one holding the said objective for longer during the fight.

Anyway, I prefer End Game Scoring because:

+ It makes Objective Secured units more valuable. Don't want to lose them all over the game.

+ Less random. Good tactics and good match-up may still end up in complete failure if the cards don't do your way.




Automatically Appended Next Post:

Stux wrote:
Irrelevant, because games always end in tabling. At least in my experience!

Might be the case in 7th edition. It's much more difficult to wipe out your opponent's army now in 8th edition. Units have way more wounds and Instant Death/vehicle Explosion has been removed.

bibotot wrote:
Why so? It's very realistic. Obviously, the army that claims the objective once the dust settles is the winner, not the one holding the said objective for longer during the fight.

Anyway, I prefer End Game Scoring because:

+ It makes Objective Secured units more valuable. Don't want to lose them all over the game.

+ Less random. Good tactics and good match-up may still end up in complete failure if the cards don't do your way.

There are plenty of realistic reasons for progressive scoring. Obsec is no less valuable. Way more tactics, sorry....

More tactics or different tactics?

Endgame feels more realistic, although some of the progessive scoring missions are sensible.

I mostly play endgame with a smattering of progressive. I leave it to the other players preference. Usuly BRB, sometimes the cards. Haven't really looked into the CA missions. Haven't played itc since 7th. Had a lot of fun with maelstrom in 7th.

I really liked the "secret" missions of 2nd, actually.

I agree with other posters that the ideal setup might be a forced mix of endgame/progressive. Knowing the mission "trend" has an effect on lists, so more mission diversity is healthier, imo.