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 Marmatag wrote:

meleti wrote:
Marmatag's a smart guy, once he's done complaining about chess clocks I am sure he will recognize you can just practice playing faster, use a dice engine, and agree to play by intent whenever possible.

Not sure if sarcastic, but I am already practicing with clocks. If it isn't obvious from my posts I play 40k competitively. I already play with intent, and use the GW approved dice app. It's like the only way to get to turn 5.

I would have 0 objections to clocks if the games were capped at 5 turns. 6 turns in 2.5 hours is just infeasible. And you're talking about a significant points swing if you can't make it to turn 6, but your opponent can with time. They'll probably get +2 for kills, +2 for objectives, and you'll be denied last strike, or possibly linebreaker.

I am completely serious. I am sure you can figure out clocks, so I can't take the "well guess I have to take up Custodes" bull seriously. Like at all.

A point could be made that if your introducing chess clocks you might want to get rid of the random game length and just cap the game at 5 turns so players can better account for how much time they can spend on a turn instead of having to rush turn 4/5 so they keep 20min (random number) left on their clock in case there is a turn 6 or even 7.

 Ordana wrote:
A point could be made that if your introducing chess clocks you might want to get rid of the random game length and just cap the game at 5 turns so players can better account for how much time they can spend on a turn instead of having to rush turn 4/5 so they keep 20min (random number) left on their clock in case there is a turn 6 or even 7.

Yeah, this is sensible.

Sunny Side Up wrote:

meleti wrote:


Both players bring the same number of points, does that mean they need the same number of models? Of course not.

If the game allows equal points and different model counts, it can also allow equal points and different time counts.

Precisely because of the first, the conclusion that time needs to be equal because points are equal does not follow.

This video explains why trying to allocate time-based on models is a terrible idea
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaHgZt8v95U
There are all the issues he brings up and more. not to mention the simple thing of tournaments having to set aside time by each round just to determine who is getting how much time... And you would end up still needing clocks to make sure each person was using their proper amount of time that would change with each opponent you play

Considering the alternative was having games finish still on turn 2-3, I am completely OK with games ending on turn 5 instead if it comes to that.

 Ordana wrote:
A point could be made that if your introducing chess clocks you might want to get rid of the random game length and just cap the game at 5 turns so players can better account for how much time they can spend on a turn instead of having to rush turn 4/5 so they keep 20min (random number) left on their clock in case there is a turn 6 or even 7.

Game length in ITC missions is already non-random. Is that not the case in ETC?

 Arachnofiend wrote:

 Ordana wrote:
A point could be made that if your introducing chess clocks you might want to get rid of the random game length and just cap the game at 5 turns so players can better account for how much time they can spend on a turn instead of having to rush turn 4/5 so they keep 20min (random number) left on their clock in case there is a turn 6 or even 7.

Game length in ITC missions is already non-random. Is that not the case in ETC?

I believe ETC is still random game length yeah.

Marmatag wrote:

Reemule wrote:

 Marmatag wrote:
I can't wait for chess clocks to destroy good faith gameplay.

When someone asks me the range of my weapons or any specific rule to my army, i'm just going to silently hand them my codex. Burn your time.

Want a friendly game? Don't put me behind the 8-ball as i play a "horde" army.

Aware of the time limit, you still brought a force your un-equipped to play, then your going to get angry and blame your opponent and treat them poorly?

Classy...

Making assumptions, super classy.

I know how to play my army.

I am not angry.

Why should i enable my opponent to play faster when it directly hurts my chances to win?

For starters you do seem pretty angry about this, but mainly, if you are equally prepared to play within the time limit with your horde army as everyone else, then this isn't a disadvantage.

This just seems like your latest narrative that you never back down from no matter how strong the logic opposing you is though, so my post here is probably as pointless as yours

Except there is no logic to address, the argument is "chess clocks are good because they're good." We're starting this with the assumption that they provide value and will meet their goal without question. I don't immediately agree with that, and I can see them having a negative impact on the gaming community.

I don't believe that equal time creates a fair game. Just like equal points between two armies doesn't create a fair game, either. Some armies are fundamentally disadvantaged when played at 2000 points, and some armies are fundamentally disadvantaged if they're played at reasonable speed but with split time.



Automatically Appended Next Post:

meleti wrote:
Considering the alternative was having games finish still on turn 2-3, I am completely OK with games ending on turn 5 instead if it comes to that.

No tournament games I have ever seen have ended on turn 2. Very incredibly rarely do games end on turn 3, but that is when both people are playing "horde" style armies and taking it to the extreme (for example, 120 cultists pre-Tide of Traitors nerf).

A game ending after the completion of turn 4, or turn 5, is perfectly fine to me. Setting the expectation that every game goes to turn 6 is unreal.

Broadly speaking, the game has generally been designed around a 6 turn game, they added random game length in 5th but that still averaged out to a 6 turn game (1/3rd chance to end equally on turn 5, 6, or 7), and that's why the ITC does 6 turns as well. Now, many games will be decided before turn 6, by tabling for example, but ideally an event should be designed such that force sizes and time availability should allow typical experienced players to easily finish a 6 turn game, with penalties for any game not making it to at least turn 5 not feeling draconian.

Im in the camp of try it and see. My only experience with deathclocks are with WMH, and as far as I know its the only other game some what similar to 40k that uses clocks. It works fine for WMHs however 40k some pretty major differences that could definately cause some issues.

The first being scale. The biggest list I ever played against in WMH had 56 models in it. This would be considered a smaller elite army in 40k. There codexes that run upwards of 200-300 models. Some of those armies that it their only viable option as far as army builds go. So its very possible deathclocks could effect codex balance. GW doesn't take deathclocks into acount when designing armies so I doubt any issues that would arise would ever get fixed.

Another big difference is that in WMH there is very few things your opponent actually does on your turn. This generally makes it easy to ask them questions and doesn't require the clock to be hammered back and forth very often. While in 40k your opponent has a way more active role in your turn.

This brings me the next major difference the volume of dice rolled in 40k is vastly greater than WMH and is probably the biggest culprit sucking up most of the time. ITC attempts to fix this issue but I think favours the person who gets to decide what happens way to much. I think a better idea would just be taking the statistcal average instead of rolling.

And finally the next biggest difference is WMH ease of access to unit rules is way easier than 40k. Every rule a unit has is printed on a unit card that you have to have during the game. This makes answering questions easy and timely. Your opponent has a question about something in your army hand them the card continue your turn. In 40k rules are spread out in codexes which make looking them up time consuming.

Also bonus diffence! WMH design team balances the game with clocks in mind GW doesn't so there is also that issue. Might have said that already but phone typing is hard.

I mean, the game timer is there either way, whether or not you have a chess clock. Remember all the chess clock does is ensure each player gets an equal amount of time, which is basically the minimum length possible to get games finished, so that the tournament can actually happen in the space of a weekend. It's the nature of how a tourney has to play to be finished, and people who are already skating on barely enough time to play their army, should have their time cut in half or even a third in the case of some armies.


The players who do best at these events bring armies designed with the nature of the event in mind, considerate of multiple factors. If you are bringing an army that can't finish games in the time you were given, that's was not your opponents call. You will still get the same amount of time as him to spend throwing dice and having fun, but yes if you can't play within your allocated time you will probably not get as good results. Get movement trays and you may find yourself with even more time on the clock than your opponent anyway.

This debate shouldn't even really be a debate honestly.

To be honest, I think the most triggering thing for me in competitive gaming of any kind is slow play. I've seen it happen in video games, in board games, and in war games, and it's super frustrating to deal with.

I personally am always trying to speed up my play, not only for competitive reasons, but also just to be courteous to my opponent. I'm not going to scoop the dice early or anything, but I tend to talk fast and don't waste 10+ seconds shaking one dice in my hand for, what, maximum randomness? I'm not the fastest player, and I have a lot to learn, but even in a casual setting I know my opponents want to get multiple games in a day and I do too.

Then you have people in the competitive setting that slow play for a straight advantage, the people that know their army and the scene and the mission well enough to know that if they can end the game on turn 2 by playing slow, they can win. It's a strategy that exists BECAUSE there's such vague rules on playing slowly.

So, I say, bring on the clocks. If my opponent brought a horde army with 150+ models to move and he didn't put them on movement trays, then I have a hard time feeling badly. I've seen players play horde armies FASTER than players play Custodes or even Knights, because they know the army, they have trays, they plan out their dice rolls efficiently, and they don't take 5+ minutes to look up a convoluted rule that'll give them one or two extra dice to throw.

Let's do it. Put those clocks down, remove the random turn length, let's get games to turn 5 within a decent amount of time. If the meta shifts away from high model count, so be it. I don't like conscript, poxwalker, cultist, or any other sort of cheesy horde spam anyway.

All I'm going to say on the matter is that while tournaments can do whatever they want, I think time clocks negatively impact the enjoyment of the game and I would not want to play in an event that used them.

I think ITC is making the right choice with death clocks. It seems to be the most equal way to split up the time.

There's a lot of tactics in positioning units and utilizing a unit's footprint on the table, that's a relatively core part of what little tactics (beyond deployment and target priority) do exist in the game, movement trays remove some of that ability even if they don't have to worry about templates anymore.

Also, outside of fantasy blocks of swordsmen, looks *really* funky and often don't fit on or around terrain, and for a game and hobby built around visuals (lets be real, nobody is playing 40k for its ruleset), that doesn't jive with a lot of people even in a competitive setting.

The Salt Mine wrote:
Im in the camp of try it and see. My only experience with deathclocks are with WMH, and as far as I know its the only other game some what similar to 40k that uses clocks. It works fine for WMHs however 40k some pretty major differences that could definately cause some issues.

The first being scale. The biggest list I ever played against in WMH had 56 models in it. This would be considered a smaller elite army in 40k. There codexes that run upwards of 200-300 models. Some of those armies that it their only viable option as far as army builds go. So its very possible deathclocks could effect codex balance. GW doesn't take deathclocks into acount when designing armies so I doubt any issues that would arise would ever get fixed.

Another big difference is that in WMH there is very few things your opponent actually does on your turn. This generally makes it easy to ask them questions and doesn't require the clock to be hammered back and forth very often. While in 40k your opponent has a way more active role in your turn.

This brings me the next major difference the volume of dice rolled in 40k is vastly greater than WMH and is probably the biggest culprit sucking up most of the time. ITC attempts to fix this issue but I think favours the person who gets to decide what happens way to much. I think a better idea would just be taking the statistcal average instead of rolling.

And finally the next biggest difference is WMH ease of access to unit rules is way easier than 40k. Every rule a unit has is printed on a unit card that you have to have during the game. This makes answering questions easy and timely. Your opponent has a question about something in your army hand them the card continue your turn. In 40k rules are spread out in codexes which make looking them up time consuming.

Also bonus diffence! WMH design team balances the game with clocks in mind GW doesn't so there is also that issue. Might have said that already but phone typing is hard.

The scale doesn't really change the game length since warmahordes has much more precise movement and facing so it takes way longer to move each model. Make sure they are spreadout enough for aoe, adjust their facing etc...

The rest are good points but they assume that the amount of time on the clock is meant to be restrictive to make it hard to finish a game. If the clock time is done right almost every game should hit the turn limit before the time limit since the clocks are only their to ensure the games finish on time.
If they implement clocks and a large percentage of games are ending on deathclock then it's a sign that the tourneys are not allowing enough times for games not that the deathclock is flawed. And it can be fixed by tweaking the amount of time on the clock

drbored wrote:
To be honest, I think the most triggering thing for me in competitive gaming of any kind is slow play. I've seen it happen in video games, in board games, and in war games, and it's super frustrating to deal with.

I personally am always trying to speed up my play, not only for competitive reasons, but also just to be courteous to my opponent. I'm not going to scoop the dice early or anything, but I tend to talk fast and don't waste 10+ seconds shaking one dice in my hand for, what, maximum randomness? I'm not the fastest player, and I have a lot to learn, but even in a casual setting I know my opponents want to get multiple games in a day and I do too.

Then you have people in the competitive setting that slow play for a straight advantage, the people that know their army and the scene and the mission well enough to know that if they can end the game on turn 2 by playing slow, they can win. It's a strategy that exists BECAUSE there's such vague rules on playing slowly.

So, I say, bring on the clocks. If my opponent brought a horde army with 150+ models to move and he didn't put them on movement trays, then I have a hard time feeling badly. I've seen players play horde armies FASTER than players play Custodes or even Knights, because they know the army, they have trays, they plan out their dice rolls efficiently, and they don't take 5+ minutes to look up a convoluted rule that'll give them one or two extra dice to throw.

Let's do it. Put those clocks down, remove the random turn length, let's get games to turn 5 within a decent amount of time. If the meta shifts away from high model count, so be it. I don't like conscript, poxwalker, cultist, or any other sort of cheesy horde spam anyway.

If movement trays were suggested and offered by GW, sure no prob.

I don't play often, but when I play I try to make the best of it. If all the tournements start having clocks, they've lost me.

This is a game that tells the story of a battle, or a specific moment in a battle. If there's a constant time issue, drop the points, run longer blocks, or both!

In 4th, when I played lot and traveled for play, 2,000 was a big , not huge, but big game. Most tournaments were 1,500-1,850, and even huge games had less models than they do now.

If they keep dropping points costs, then drop game sizes in accordance. Why rush, and make time a critical factor, when you can run a 1,250 or 1,500 tourney and players actually have time to talk and banter during game?

I'm all for 1500 pt games but we'd need to adjust rule of 3 for that. Part of 2000 pts limits the impact of rule of 3 because even with all 3 of MOST dumb units when spammed, it's not much of your army. But at 1500 pts, 3 Flyrants for example gets a bit dumber.

 SHUPPET wrote:
I'm all for 1500 pt games but we'd need to adjust rule of 3 for that. Part of 2000 pts limits the impact of rule of 3 because even with all 3 of MOST dumb units when spammed, it's not much of your army. But at 1500 pts, 3 Flyrants for example gets a bit dumber.

But they've already built in points differences to it, it's really the Rule of 2/3/4, depending on weather your playing 1,000 and under/1,001-2,000/2,001-3,000.

This limit also caps the number of detachments as well, something most folks forget.

Edit: The Rule of 3 only exists to stop the spammy nature of higher points competitive games, thus, lowering the points should also fox that issue.

 SHUPPET wrote:
I'm all for 1500 pt games but we'd need to adjust rule of 3 for that. Part of 2000 pts limits the impact of rule of 3 because even with all 3 of MOST dumb units when spammed, it's not much of your army. But at 1500 pts, 3 Flyrants for example gets a bit dumber.

Rule of 3 already has different limits for different point values. People just refer to the shorthand for 2000 point games.

I'm aware of that - I'm saying that I disagree that Rule of 3 is sufficient for a 1500 pt game, for the reasons given.

 SHUPPET wrote:
I'm aware of that - I'm saying that I disagree that Rule of 3 is sufficient for a 1500 pt game, for the reasons given.

How would you change it?

 Blndmage wrote:

 SHUPPET wrote:
I'm aware of that - I'm saying that I disagree that Rule of 3 is sufficient for a 1500 pt game, for the reasons given.

How would you change it?

Making Rule of 2 kick in at 1500 pts would be a good start. Maybe limiting it to a single LoW as well baseline, with exceptions.

 SHUPPET wrote:

 Blndmage wrote:

 SHUPPET wrote:
I'm aware of that - I'm saying that I disagree that Rule of 3 is sufficient for a 1500 pt game, for the reasons given.

How would you change it?

Making Rule of 2 kick in at 1500 pts would be a good start. Maybe limiting it to a single LoW as well baseline, with exceptions.

As someone who plays 1,000 and under pretty frequently, the Rule of 2 sucks. Applying it to 1,500 would be crazy.

I really don't understand why the community is so much against lowering points limits.

Every time GW makes a change that generates more sells we bash them because they are robbing us. For ONCE they did a change that actually has sense and lowers the entry barrier to the standard games and we refuse it?

No one had problems with index only games. Actually, many consider the index meta better and more balanced than the codex meta, so why implementing a change that puts us back to index level armies should be a bad thing?

ITC is already an heavily house ruled version of the game that is splitting the community and the feedback it provides, why increase the gap when GW has already provided an official solution to this problem?

Spoletta wrote:
...Actually, many consider the index meta better and more balanced than the codex meta, so why implementing a change that puts us back to index level armies should be a bad thing?

*laughs in Imperial Guard*

Spoletta wrote:
I really don't understand why the community is so much against lowering points limits.

Every time GW makes a change that generates more sells we bash them because they are robbing us. For ONCE they did a change that actually has sense and lowers the entry barrier to the standard games and we refuse it?

No one had problems with index only games. Actually, many consider the index meta better and more balanced than the codex meta, so why implementing a change that puts us back to index level armies should be a bad thing?

ITC is already an heavily house ruled version of the game that is splitting the community and the feedback it provides, why increase the gap when GW has already provided an official solution to this problem?

Because it unnecessarily buffs skews lists and nerfs elite armies?

Audustum wrote:


Because it unnecessarily buffs skews lists and nerfs elite armies?

Not nearly as bad as the ITC Missions do.

Audustum wrote:

Spoletta wrote:
I really don't understand why the community is so much against lowering points limits.

Every time GW makes a change that generates more sells we bash them because they are robbing us. For ONCE they did a change that actually has sense and lowers the entry barrier to the standard games and we refuse it?

No one had problems with index only games. Actually, many consider the index meta better and more balanced than the codex meta, so why implementing a change that puts us back to index level armies should be a bad thing?

ITC is already an heavily house ruled version of the game that is splitting the community and the feedback it provides, why increase the gap when GW has already provided an official solution to this problem?

Because it unnecessarily buffs skews lists and nerfs elite armies?

And 2000 points games are cramped, alpha strikey, favour factions with lots of internal sinergies and nerf deep strikers and everyone who doesn't have decent screens.

No watter what point level you play, you are shifting the meta a bit, so your argument is void.

That said, we are not talking about moving to 1000 points were what you said is actually a big problem, we are talking about 1750, which isn't that different from 2000. The biggest difference is that you have more space to move on the board (1-3 less units per side) and the game ends overall quicker.

I really feel like ITC is becoming too snob for it's own good. Creating a mission packet is one thing, but outright refusing GW fix to time limits and coming out with theyr own is another.