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I was really looking forward to the new Missions. They updated the old ones but they have ruined it by including the worst mechanic from last year.

'Acceptable Losses' is a terrible mechanic. I dont know where the idea even came from, but it really makes the game unplayable when opponents never have to play like they're going to get tabled. It also removes the option to still win a game even when you're behind on points. It really makes it difficult for those armies/matchups where scoring objectives is difficult. The only good thing that came out of it was that it forced players to provide feedback on mission objectives and allow GW to balance them. Sudden Death needs to be put back in.

The other change that is really stupid is the further nerfing of Maelstrom decks down to 18 objectives. Players dont have to build an army that has to be able to accomplish a variety of objectives, and can now cater their deck to fit the army. It's a tragedy that units are now going to get overlooked because they dont fit into the ITC/Tournament mentality.

Even with Maelstrom now being a joke, there are another 1w missions that the ITC/Tournament scene is going to continue to ignore, and will add more useless feedback and ruin the Missions even more when CA 2020 comes out. If the 'Competetive 40k' community is going to continue to drive the game further away from actual 40k, then GW needs to make that known, before our collections become impossible to sell.

 Akar wrote:
I was really looking forward to the new Missions. They updated the old ones but they have ruined it by including the worst mechanic from last year.

'Acceptable Losses' is a terrible mechanic. I dont know where the idea even came from, but it really makes the game unplayable when opponents never have to play like they're going to get tabled. It also removes the option to still win a game even when you're behind on points. It really makes it difficult for those armies/matchups where scoring objectives is difficult. The only good thing that came out of it was that it forced players to provide feedback on mission objectives and allow GW to balance them. Sudden Death needs to be put back in.

The other change that is really stupid is the further nerfing of Maelstrom decks down to 18 objectives. Players dont have to build an army that has to be able to accomplish a variety of objectives, and can now cater their deck to fit the army. It's a tragedy that units are now going to get overlooked because they dont fit into the ITC/Tournament mentality.

Even with Maelstrom now being a joke, there are another 1w missions that the ITC/Tournament scene is going to continue to ignore, and will add more useless feedback and ruin the Missions even more when CA 2020 comes out. If the 'Competetive 40k' community is going to continue to drive the game further away from actual 40k, then GW needs to make that known, before our collections become impossible to sell.

I wholeheartedly disagree that tabling should be an auto win. Table your opponent turn 3, keep on playing and capping objectives for 2+ turns and see if you out point them. If you can't then your opponent played better, since aiming to wreck the other army is very one dimensional thinking.

Wayniac wrote:
I pray this is the beginning of the end for the ITC missions. They are a big part of the reason that "competitive" 40k in the USA is a gak show since secondaries are fundamental changes to the nature of the game.

But people put way too many laurels on ITC and FLG so I doubt they will change anytime soon and continue to skew the playerbase with their terrible, bland missions that push listbuilding over play.

Completely agree, ITC limits the units you can even take b.c of the secondaries, in GW missions even rhinos can have a place b.c you are not worried when they die you give up points, look at Tau Piranhas for example, they count as 2 units, that could be a secondary and a kill more just right there.

Dudeface wrote:

 Akar wrote:
I was really looking forward to the new Missions. They updated the old ones but they have ruined it by including the worst mechanic from last year.

'Acceptable Losses' is a terrible mechanic. I dont know where the idea even came from, but it really makes the game unplayable when opponents never have to play like they're going to get tabled. It also removes the option to still win a game even when you're behind on points. It really makes it difficult for those armies/matchups where scoring objectives is difficult. The only good thing that came out of it was that it forced players to provide feedback on mission objectives and allow GW to balance them. Sudden Death needs to be put back in.

The other change that is really stupid is the further nerfing of Maelstrom decks down to 18 objectives. Players dont have to build an army that has to be able to accomplish a variety of objectives, and can now cater their deck to fit the army. It's a tragedy that units are now going to get overlooked because they dont fit into the ITC/Tournament mentality.

Even with Maelstrom now being a joke, there are another 1w missions that the ITC/Tournament scene is going to continue to ignore, and will add more useless feedback and ruin the Missions even more when CA 2020 comes out. If the 'Competetive 40k' community is going to continue to drive the game further away from actual 40k, then GW needs to make that known, before our collections become impossible to sell.

I wholeheartedly disagree that tabling should be an auto win. Table your opponent turn 3, keep on playing and capping objectives for 2+ turns and see if you out point them. If you can't then your opponent played better, since aiming to wreck the other army is very one dimensional thinking.

Agree, if my opponent only cares about killing and takes turn 1 and 2 to do nothing but try to table me, but i spent turns 1-3 gaining points, i could make it so he cant win at all even if on his turn 3 he tables me, especially if i body blocked him away from an objective or 2 so it takes 2 turns to get to it after i die. I've won games in the past with 1 unit left on table compare to my opponents 1/2 an army.

 Akar wrote:
'Acceptable Losses' is a terrible mechanic. I dont know where the idea even came from, but it really makes the game unplayable when opponents never have to play like they're going to get tabled. It also removes the option to still win a game even when you're behind on points. It really makes it difficult for those armies/matchups where scoring objectives is difficult. The only good thing that came out of it was that it forced players to provide feedback on mission objectives and allow GW to balance them. Sudden Death needs to be put back in.

It prevents games from boiling down to killing everything too often.

The other change that is really stupid is the further nerfing of Maelstrom decks down to 18 objectives. Players dont have to build an army that has to be able to accomplish a variety of objectives, and can now cater their deck to fit the army. It's a tragedy that units are now going to get overlooked because they dont fit into the ITC/Tournament mentality.

Ridiculous, every army can complete every objective, if you actually cared about winning you'd build your list around winning objectives just like people do when they build lists for ITC. Any list can win in any format, but by taking a variety of units you are punished in Maelstrom because of the missions that reward killing a unit with Fly, Titanic unit whatever. ITC can be tackled in three ways, you can try and deny your opponent secondaries entirely by making a very mal-aligned force, you can say screw it and just take a few different unit types and be easy to counter with secondaries or you can be hyperfocussed and be easy to get a few secondaries against but make the other ones impossible.

With Maelstrom it's pretty much the same, take one unit with Fly and it might get shot down before your opponent draws the right objective, take all Fly units and no Vehicles and you can deny another objective.

Even with Maelstrom now being a joke, there are another 1w missions that the ITC/Tournament scene is going to continue to ignore, and will add more useless feedback and ruin the Missions even more when CA 2020 comes out. If the 'Competetive 40k' community is going to continue to drive the game further away from actual 40k, then GW needs to make that known, before our collections become impossible to sell.

No feedback is more useless than what is gotten by a couple of people smashing random forces together, casual games do not create good feedback for balance. Even if the format is slightly different having an actual competitive format being played by competitive players is far more valuable than people drawing lots to define the competitive balance of the future with missions that may determine the winner on its own, it's another factor that GW has to account for when balancing, with ITC you at least know more or less what is going on. One game isn't going to be determined by all the objectives drifting in the direction of the Necron lines so that while they get shot down they still win despite killing nothing and having less overall board control.

One thing to note with the new CA Maelstrom missions - always take the kingslayer objective - where you get D3 points if you have killed the warlord in a previous turn.
one point to note is that once an objective is scored you place it in the discard pile. for 2CP you can gain back some of your "discarded" cards and keep doing this each turn. so if you manage to kill the warlord effectivly you can gain multiple lots of D3 victory points...

 The Forgemaster wrote:
One thing to note with the new CA Maelstrom missions - always take the kingslayer objective - where you get D3 points if you have killed the warlord in a previous turn.
one point to note is that once an objective is scored you place it in the discard pile. for 2CP you can gain back some of your "discarded" cards and keep doing this each turn. so if you manage to kill the warlord effectivly you can gain multiple lots of D3 victory points...

Sounds like a fun and tactical game.

If GW is determined to go down this route they need to seriously start giving more resources to Narrative game options.

Dai wrote:

If GW is determined to go down this route they need to seriously start giving more resources to Narrative game options.

Seems like you missed these articles:

https://www.warhammer-community.com/2019/11/28/chapter-approved-2019-forging-a-narrativegw-homepage-post-2/
https://www.warhammer-community.com/2019/11/27/chapter-approved-2019-three-ways-to-make-your-next-club-night-awesomegw-homepage-post-4/

Nah, Kingslayer can only be scored once. The only advantage to grabbing it a second time is if you only rolled a 1 on the VP d3 and wanna reroll it.



EDIT: and before you ask why can it be only scored once...…….. Your only allowed to take each card once first, and once you killed the warlord, there are no other warlords to kill. Yes the strat lets you replay the card, but it only ever awards D3 victory points. You wanna reroll your D3 go ahead and pay 2 CP and waste the chance for a new card.

 Eihnlazer wrote:
Nah, Kingslayer can only be scored once. The only advantage to grabbing it a second time is if you only rolled a 1 on the VP d3 and wanna reroll it.



EDIT: and before you ask why can it be only scored once...…….. Your only allowed to take each card once first, and once you killed the warlord, there are no other warlords to kill. Yes the strat lets you replay the card, but it only ever awards D3 victory points. You wanna reroll your D3 go ahead and pay 2 CP and waste the chance for a new card.

Your only allowed to take each card once first

Source?

CA: 2019


For those missions you take a deck of 18 cards, and cannot take multiples of the same card.

Wayniac wrote:
I pray this is the beginning of the end for the ITC missions. They are a big part of the reason that "competitive" 40k in the USA is a gak show since secondaries are fundamental changes to the nature of the game.

But people put way too many laurels on ITC and FLG so I doubt they will change anytime soon and continue to skew the playerbase with their terrible, bland missions that push listbuilding over play.

I like player agency and hate randomness. If i could get rid of die rolls i would.

Wayniac wrote:
I pray this is the beginning of the end for the ITC missions. They are a big part of the reason that "competitive" 40k in the USA is a gak show since secondaries are fundamental changes to the nature of the game.

But people put way too many laurels on ITC and FLG so I doubt they will change anytime soon and continue to skew the playerbase with their terrible, bland missions that push listbuilding over play.

Imagine thinking the game won't be based around list building still due to poor external balance.

Martel732 wrote:

Wayniac wrote:
I pray this is the beginning of the end for the ITC missions. They are a big part of the reason that "competitive" 40k in the USA is a gak show since secondaries are fundamental changes to the nature of the game.

But people put way too many laurels on ITC and FLG so I doubt they will change anytime soon and continue to skew the playerbase with their terrible, bland missions that push listbuilding over play.

I like player agency and hate randomness. If i could get rid of die rolls i would.

Problem with that is that the more your remove randomness the more the battle is decided by looking at the lists and doing some math.

Maelstrom makes you do things on the battlefield and react on the fly. Which makes for more interesting games then 2 armies lining up and shooting eachother until one is dead.

But to each his own.

I have to react on the fly in Starcraft, and it has no randomness at all.

Wayniac wrote:
I pray this is the beginning of the end for the ITC missions. They are a big part of the reason that "competitive" 40k in the USA is a gak show since secondaries are fundamental changes to the nature of the game.

But people put way too many laurels on ITC and FLG so I doubt they will change anytime soon and continue to skew the playerbase with their terrible, bland missions that push listbuilding over play.

That's strange I don't remember 6th and 7th being balanced, must be my faulty memory failing me again.

So nothing done about D3 VPs and just calling it flat 2 ? Lame...

 Ordana wrote:

Martel732 wrote:

Wayniac wrote:
I pray this is the beginning of the end for the ITC missions. They are a big part of the reason that "competitive" 40k in the USA is a gak show since secondaries are fundamental changes to the nature of the game.

But people put way too many laurels on ITC and FLG so I doubt they will change anytime soon and continue to skew the playerbase with their terrible, bland missions that push listbuilding over play.

I like player agency and hate randomness. If i could get rid of die rolls i would.

Problem with that is that the more your remove randomness the more the battle is decided by looking at the lists and doing some math.

Maelstrom makes you do things on the battlefield and react on the fly. Which makes for more interesting games then 2 armies lining up and shooting eachother until one is dead.

But to each his own.

Maelstrom forces this largely through arbitrary and meaningless randomness, lacking both narrative cohesion or tactical decision-tree elements and often heavily favors things that many armies simply don't have access to (such as the ability to redeploy across the board rapidly with multiple units) or awards points for things that can be out of a players control/trivial/impossible (e.g. "manifest a psychic power") and are fundamentally just bad game design. Dynamic or asymmetrical objectives can be fun, but Maelstrom's execution is, and always has been, pretty awful.

Pitched firefight missions have their issues, no doubt, but Maelstrom has never been a terribly well crafted answer to that.

 The Forgemaster wrote:
One thing to note with the new CA Maelstrom missions - always take the kingslayer objective - where you get D3 points if you have killed the warlord in a previous turn.
one point to note is that once an objective is scored you place it in the discard pile. for 2CP you can gain back some of your "discarded" cards and keep doing this each turn. so if you manage to kill the warlord effectivly you can gain multiple lots of D3 victory points...

The stratagem for 2CP puts the cards from the discard pile INTO THE DECK, not in your hand.
You need to draw it again.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Vaktathi wrote:

 Ordana wrote:

Martel732 wrote:

Wayniac wrote:
I pray this is the beginning of the end for the ITC missions. They are a big part of the reason that "competitive" 40k in the USA is a gak show since secondaries are fundamental changes to the nature of the game.

But people put way too many laurels on ITC and FLG so I doubt they will change anytime soon and continue to skew the playerbase with their terrible, bland missions that push listbuilding over play.

I like player agency and hate randomness. If i could get rid of die rolls i would.

Problem with that is that the more your remove randomness the more the battle is decided by looking at the lists and doing some math.

Maelstrom makes you do things on the battlefield and react on the fly. Which makes for more interesting games then 2 armies lining up and shooting eachother until one is dead.

But to each his own.

Maelstrom forces this largely through arbitrary and meaningless randomness, lacking both narrative cohesion or tactical decision-tree elements and often heavily favors things that many armies simply don't have access to (such as the ability to redeploy across the board rapidly with multiple units) or awards points for things that can be out of a players control/trivial/impossible (e.g. "manifest a psychic power") and are fundamentally just bad game design. Dynamic or asymmetrical objectives can be fun, but Maelstrom's execution is, and always has been, pretty awful.

Pitched firefight missions have their issues, no doubt, but Maelstrom has never been a terribly well crafted answer to that.

I though the same until CA18.

With this new maelstrom format, the randomness is dialed down to a level which makes it controllable and fair for all.

We surely need to get some games under our belts before we talk, but for now i like it a lot and can see high level tournaments using them.

Martel732 wrote:
I have to react on the fly in Starcraft, and it has no randomness at all.

starcraft is a video game, not a turn based game. If you begin to move your assault squad close to my devestator marines I can't immediatly move them away, I have to wait until my turn.

Randomness makes things exciting, it adds a bit of RISK/Reward to the element. sure charging that custodes with the guardsman likely won't work out very well, but maybe it will. a little bit of randomness means there is an element of the game where taking chances can pay off.

I find that more intreasting then button spamming and zerg rushing.

 Vaktathi wrote:

 Ordana wrote:

Martel732 wrote:

Wayniac wrote:
I pray this is the beginning of the end for the ITC missions. They are a big part of the reason that "competitive" 40k in the USA is a gak show since secondaries are fundamental changes to the nature of the game.

But people put way too many laurels on ITC and FLG so I doubt they will change anytime soon and continue to skew the playerbase with their terrible, bland missions that push listbuilding over play.

I like player agency and hate randomness. If i could get rid of die rolls i would.

Problem with that is that the more your remove randomness the more the battle is decided by looking at the lists and doing some math.

Maelstrom makes you do things on the battlefield and react on the fly. Which makes for more interesting games then 2 armies lining up and shooting eachother until one is dead.

But to each his own.

Maelstrom forces this largely through arbitrary and meaningless randomness, lacking both narrative cohesion or tactical decision-tree elements and often heavily favors things that many armies simply don't have access to (such as the ability to redeploy across the board rapidly with multiple units) or awards points for things that can be out of a players control/trivial/impossible (e.g. "manifest a psychic power") and are fundamentally just bad game design. Dynamic or asymmetrical objectives can be fun, but Maelstrom's execution is, and always has been, pretty awful.

Pitched firefight missions have their issues, no doubt, but Maelstrom has never been a terribly well crafted answer to that.

I agree...up until CA19. The new Maelstrom missions combine an element of randomness with sufficient player agency to mitigate that randomness, as well as a couple of interesting mechanics in the missions themselves to further manipulate the cards. There's no excuse now for having unachievable objectives in your deck and you get to decide when you want to try to achieve each one to a certain extent. The new Maelstrom missions are, IMO, vastly better than ITC in virtually every way.

While that's clearly the goal, I want to play a couple of games before I make a judgement on how much less random it has become.

Martel732 wrote:
I have to react on the fly in Starcraft, and it has no randomness at all.

That's like saying there is no randomness on rock paper scissors because you don't use any dice. Sure, that's an exaggeration, but with fog of war, you can use some "coin flip" strategy where you just try a strat and depending on what the other player decided to do, you are either in a very strong or very weak position.

Chess has even less randomness because it has no hidden information, and it's turned-based too!
(And boring imho but to each their own, some people love it)

Okay theres no random unit effects. I dont like gw's 'just roll dice' approach. Just flip a coin or roll off for the winner.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

Slipspace wrote:

 Vaktathi wrote:

 Ordana wrote:

Martel732 wrote:

Wayniac wrote:
I pray this is the beginning of the end for the ITC missions. They are a big part of the reason that "competitive" 40k in the USA is a gak show since secondaries are fundamental changes to the nature of the game.

But people put way too many laurels on ITC and FLG so I doubt they will change anytime soon and continue to skew the playerbase with their terrible, bland missions that push listbuilding over play.

I like player agency and hate randomness. If i could get rid of die rolls i would.

Problem with that is that the more your remove randomness the more the battle is decided by looking at the lists and doing some math.

Maelstrom makes you do things on the battlefield and react on the fly. Which makes for more interesting games then 2 armies lining up and shooting eachother until one is dead.

But to each his own.

Maelstrom forces this largely through arbitrary and meaningless randomness, lacking both narrative cohesion or tactical decision-tree elements and often heavily favors things that many armies simply don't have access to (such as the ability to redeploy across the board rapidly with multiple units) or awards points for things that can be out of a players control/trivial/impossible (e.g. "manifest a psychic power") and are fundamentally just bad game design. Dynamic or asymmetrical objectives can be fun, but Maelstrom's execution is, and always has been, pretty awful.

Pitched firefight missions have their issues, no doubt, but Maelstrom has never been a terribly well crafted answer to that.

I agree...up until CA19. The new Maelstrom missions combine an element of randomness with sufficient player agency to mitigate that randomness, as well as a couple of interesting mechanics in the missions themselves to further manipulate the cards. There's no excuse now for having unachievable objectives in your deck and you get to decide when you want to try to achieve each one to a certain extent. The new Maelstrom missions are, IMO, vastly better than ITC in virtually every way.

Still too random for me.

I wish they would just remove seize the initiative from the missions and come up with a real consolidation for going second and losing 1/4th - 1/2 of your army turn 1.

Perhaps the player going second should chose the deployment type and chose the player going firsts deployment zone.

Martel732 wrote:
Okay theres no random unit effects. I dont like gw's 'just roll dice' approach. Just flip a coin or roll off for the winner.

You never held the highground in Starcraft 1?

Those new missions look like a little more time for a little less randomness- i like it!

Also might try to max out CP to get all the objectives i want.
Gotta let the opponent table me while scoing max. objectives turn by turn.
Also getting back some of the cards from discard pile sounds cool. 2 CP for getting that defend objective for a second time? Hell yeah!

I actually like all of those changes. Haven't played since the great Marine Misteps. If they'd get them reigned in these sound pretty fun.

Bharring wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
Okay theres no random unit effects. I dont like gw's 'just roll dice' approach. Just flip a coin or roll off for the winner.

You never held the highground in Starcraft 1?

They got rid of that mechanic

 Xenomancers wrote:
I wish they would just remove seize the initiative from the missions and come up with a real consolidation for going second and losing 1/4th - 1/2 of your army turn 1.

Perhaps the player going second should chose the deployment type and chose the player going firsts deployment zone.

Lol, did you read the first post? You are literally asking for what is being done.

- Deployment rules have been updated again. You now roll off to decide who is attackerand who is defender. The defender can SELECT THE DEPLOYMENT TYPE and select the deployment zone. The attacker then deploys the full army and the defender counter deploys. The attacker goes first and can be seized, or can decide to go second but cannot seize. Since there are no longer missions where you score at the end of the round, going second will not give you an advantage on scoring. These deployment rules were implemented to give an overwhelming positioning advantage to the player going second. Sounds fair, but i will have to try it.

The player going second has a massive advantage.

Selects the deployment type, the deployment zone, fully counter deploys, has prepared positions AND can seize.

Please note that selecting deployment type and zone can protect you from many alpha strikes, like for example the raven guard assault centurions, or can give you more objectives on your side of the table.

If you go first, you have the chance at alpha striking the opponent, but you are fighting an uphill battle from round 1.

I think that with these rules i would always elect to go second.

The Defender doesn't select the deployment type. They determine it. Determine means roll a dice and consult the chart. They do select the zone, which is a big advantage, they do have prepared positions and in some eternal war missions going second is a distinct scoring advantage.