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 Ishagu wrote:

Karol wrote:
A competitor shouldn't be liked, he should be the best .

If 40k was an actual sport and a job where people generated their incomes you might have a point. As it stand, for 99.999% of people this is a voluntary hobby and nothing more.

So you are very wrong, you see. People don't HAVE to be there. They don't HAVE to put up with socially backward individuals.

and yet they continue to allow you to post

 Inquisitor Lord Katherine wrote:
1: Objective markers are placed before determining deployment zones, and placed by alternating order, 6" in and 12" apart. That basically should say all you need to know about why he didn't and could not place his objective markers safely in his zone. He A: didn't know where his zone would be or even what it would look like, and

As I pointed out, you can place objectives in such a way that they are deep within one deployment zone, no matter what deployment you roll. Defender gets to pick his deployment zone, which means he can always pick the one with two or more objectives in it.

B: had to place his objectives such that they were far enough away from the ones I put down. In general, I try to place objectives in such a way that it prevents my opponent from placing objectives in good positions, like sheltered buildings and board corners. My basic process for objective placement is along the lines as follows: Usually, my first objective goes towards the midboard, just far enough from the edges that the 12"+6" will prevent objectives from being placed further edgeward than it, and usually in the open more than 3" from any good positions or cover.

Such an objective is always within or very close to a deployment zone of you have wedges. Preventing you from blocking it should be possible.

My second objective is usually placed more into the potential zones, but also in the open because I have no guarantee that the one I place it in will be mine. Last one goes somewhere that's left, or is placed aggressively to interfere with the opponent's placement. Some times I shake this up if I'm facing somebody who I don't expect to be able to really last long in the middle against and get my objectives in edges and corners, but it's risky to do that since there's like a 50/50 chance that I could just get completely screwed if I put objectives in safe places and they don't do the same. You usually want to mirror the enemy objective placement. If one player places defensively and one player places aggressively, you stand a chance to just get really screwed if you don't get to pick zones.

The player going second always gets to pick zones. If he doesn't get to pick zones, you can't deny him midfield with the strategy you described.

2: He obviously didn't have a daemon primarch or lord of skulls. You're getting kind of ridiculous here. Beyond just not owning one, I haven't seen a Lord of Skulls on the table for the entire duration of it's existence as a model, a player reasonably new to the game definitely has no expectation owning one much less using one.

Obviously any powerful assault unit would work, including, but not limited to knights, daemon princes, greater daemons or khorn berzerkers. Plus there are lists with tripple Lords of Skulls in tournaments right now, since it has become pretty cheap with last CA. It's also about the mission lockdown in general, not about that specific player. The whole point is that getting too close to your enemy can go wrong in a really bad way and therefore is not a sure-fire way to win that mission.

3: Only units within 1" of the enemy [or charged in the charge phase] are eligible to fight. To the best of my or his understanding, he can't Fury of Khorne an unengaged unit for 6" of movement towards the closest enemy unit.

He can fury of khorne a unit that has charged your infiltrator/deep striker, as it has assaulted this turn.

4: Movement occurs before psychic, shooting, and fighting. He doesn't have an opportunity to clear the screen until after he's been unable to cross it.

Objectives don't disappear in the first turn, so he can clear your screen turn one and move onto objectives turn two. In addition, both are playing had access to warp time, why didn't they use it?

Okay, BR as best as I can reconstruct it [again], since it was like a month and a half ago:

First of all, thanks for doing that.
Understand that I don't want to "win" this argument for the sake of winning, but that I genuinely think that the collection set of CA2019 (and non-maelstrom CA2018) are superior to ITC's single game-warping mission. We have a club which regularly plays on multiple tables and has been a huge enemy of GW's mission in the past, like many. These days, the whole bandwidth of casual to competitive players come asking whether someone has the new CA so they can play the missions from them, as they solve a lot of problems the original BRB missions had and ITC still has. Almost everyone has gotten a bloody nose from playing one of the missions ill prepared, but we are currently in a meta that has evolved from there and bandwidth of units and armies are played is insane compared to what we have experienced in the last ten years of WH40k.

There was really one major fatal mistake he made, and that was setting up on objective 6, which allowed me to charge it and get on it. The actual choice of objective 6 wasn't bad, I probably would have done the same since it seemed easy to guard, well protected from 3 directions, and just a strong position to be in in general. It was the cultists sitting on it that broke it, since they were an available charge target that without I would have been sitting back in the midfield.

He made other mistakes too, that probably would have added up to him losing the game anyway, but he was less than a year into the hobby and it was his first 1500 points.

I agree with this, him not properly screening out the deep strikers was his loss. In addition, lists like his aren't really strong, i recently tabled a WE in T2 with my ork buggies without actually meaning to do so.
But that isn't really the fault of the mission - had you both played the same and you were running crusade instead of lockdown, you still would have curb-stomped him points-wise.
In general, I stand by my previous analysis. You won a well deserved victory against a less skilled and ill prepared opponent who made multiple fatal mistakes. Nothing wrong with that.

In my more recent game on Lockdown, it was less dramatic since I was more conservative and careful about it, but I pulled fundamentally the same trick of zoning in my enemy with Interceptors to prevent them from being able to access points. More recently, I started my warlord on the field and gated him forward so he could give re-rolls to the interceptors on the charge so they could make their charges so I would throw away fewer units and more reliably screen in a greater area [though RoTD also helped me out by upping my lethality between the first game and the second]. This one was also against Chaos, Alpha Legion this time but a superficially similar basic list concept, but a different player. He did better on points, using his AL stratagem toolbox to avoid being completely trapped in, and I played more conservatively with a less rapid win in mind. Also, both 2 and 3 wound up being objectives near or in his zone, which really sucked for him. He wound up conceding after turn three.

What I don't get is how those interceptors are boxing in an army of CSM for two turns. Whatever they charge is dead, sure, but there should be something like havocs, obliterators, a daemon prince or something that can smite behind them that should have no issue killing 30 MEQ, even if they benefiting from the tide of shadows.
I use warbikers or da jumped boyz to do the very same to my opponents, but both tend to be mostly wiped out when turn 2 starts.

I still wouldn't say Lockdown is a good mission. The first game was really bad, the second game was honestly not actually that much better, and kind of informed my thoughts on how I think it really does just come down to getting units out in the midfield earlier and taking the turn to rush the enemy and box them in. I don't think there are any FLY troop choices, so I think that SM infiltrators might actually be nigh on unbeatable in the mission if they take the first turn. I'm not really eager to try with my Space Wolves though, because I'd rather my weekly game be a good one with a good mission than prove a pet theory with a list tailored to win the worst mission in the packet to prove it's badness.

From my experience, SM infiltration units are really expensive for what they bring to the table, and they aren't that hard to kill. If you properly defend your objective #6 and take one objective from your enemy by the end of your turn 2, you should be able to catch up, as they tend to run out of models quickly. Beating a pile of intercessors sitting on objectives in cover is much more difficult than handling those infiltrators with their fancy (but bad) bolt guns.

8-0-1 is technically a lot better record than I am on ITC missions [though I've played a lot more than 9 ITC games over the course of this edition], and that showing has been generated with all my factions instead of basically just my sisters of battle and sometimes my guard, but like I've felt like some of my games were just decided by the mission being drawn being massively in my favor, some were just unsatisfying, and some like the aforementioned were really one-sided in a way that I've only experienced in extreme cases in ITC missions. Coming back has also felt really hard in all of them that I played, with my early leads turning into runaway victories with careful play and even small early deficits taking like the rest of the game to claw my way back to win by a point or two [or the draw, which I trailed by 2 points in for the entire game until I matched the score on turn 5 right before the game ended by rolling a 2].

I think the issue here is that your opponent probably don't have a lot of experience with non-ITC missions either and that ITC armies usually don't work really well in CA missions.
We have one guy who always uses netlists with some random units sprinkled in so he can claim that they are "fluffy fun lists" I think he is on a ten game loss streak currently, as ITC lists built to beat ITC lists in ITC games. They forgo units that excel at clearing or defending objectives or threatening the backfield and unit with high mobility or versatility to optimize for killing key threats and certain types of units for secondaries, while avoiding certain options in order to deny opponent scoring.
You are basically gutting yourself for CA missions when you optimize for ITC.

The whole debate over whether hobby scores should be submitted to ITC/GW isn't super relevant to the thread except when it's making me distrust CA tournament results, but I think tournaments should have a minimum and ban anyone that doesn't meet it, no hobby score, at least not one that is submitted to ITC/GW (red/yellow cards or warnings given to players could be shared in TO groups). It is super unhelpful as far as balance goes to report the scores as a package instead of separately, twip scores, average first loss etc. are unaffected, but looking at top 4s is useless both for finding good lists and for balancing the game if those top 4s are determined by factors outside the rules of the game.

You should have the same level of minimum sportsmanship at the top and bottom table, if you can't keep up high sportsmanship after losing a few games and not having a chance to win any prizes then you shouldn't go to tournaments at all. Maybe it's mostly a problem at the top tables where people can't keep up the sportsmanly conduct under pressure, but increased streaming of tournaments will help highlight the players winning tournaments while being poor sports, for the rest of the tables you're going to need a minimum level and I don't see why that minimum level shouldn't be high enough that it's also enough to cover the top tables.

 Jidmah wrote:

 Inquisitor Lord Katherine wrote:
3: Only units within 1" of the enemy [or charged in the charge phase] are eligible to fight. To the best of my or his understanding, he can't Fury of Khorne an unengaged unit for 6" of movement towards the closest enemy unit.

He can fury of khorne a unit that has charged your infiltrator/deep striker, as it has assaulted this turn.

 Ishagu wrote:

Karol wrote:
A competitor shouldn't be liked, he should be the best .

If 40k was an actual sport and a job where people generated their incomes you might have a point. As it stand, for 99.999% of people this is a voluntary hobby and nothing more.

So you are very wrong, you see. People don't HAVE to be there. They don't HAVE to put up with socially backward individuals.

"Be kind".

 vict0988 wrote:
Not sure if everyone who reads this is aware, but you need to actually make it in to count as having charged and to be able to fight two/three times.

Of course, but this shouldn't be an issue when there are movement blockers right in front of you

 Canadian 5th wrote:

 Melissia wrote:

Karol wrote:
A competitor shouldn't be liked, he should be the best .

If a competitor is a salty little bitch even when s/he wins, and treats his/her opponents like trash, s/he isn't the best.

Just because someone won a tournament doesn't necessitate them being a better player. Especially not in a game with so many random elements as 40k where luck can and will throw games on way or the other with ease. It's very easy to simply luck out one way or the other when you have so few games as a tournament will have, and tournaments can hardly have more games, because of how long games of 40k take.

So I guess only nice teams win the Superbowl/Champions League/Stanley Cup then...

If I go to a tournament I'd like to be able to treat it as if it were a sporting event and leave it all on the table. If I'm just playing a pickup game at the shop, I'll treat it more like a rec hockey league and soften my rougher edges. I suspect that most tournament players view things the same way.

This isn’t the NFL/AFL.

Moreover, players do go out of their way to establish a reputation ally acceptable persona as otherwise they tend to lose their contract or not get played.

Also... this isn’t a competitive sport. It’s a niche hobby which can only survive by attracting others to engage in it. When or if it ever surpasses into the heady echelons of super-popularity like international soccer then maybe a reflection on scoring systems which *gasp* promote civil play could take place.

In the meantime, I’d rather be able to point to sanctioned events and their integrated “be awesome to each other” point system when I introduce others to the activity.

Jidmah wrote:

 vict0988 wrote:
Not sure if everyone who reads this is aware, but you need to actually make it in to count as having charged and to be able to fight two/three times.

Of course, but this shouldn't be an issue when there are movement blockers right in front of you

Of course, he could have used it on those guys, but as mentioned, they cleared their targets, took the long consolidate off their second fight, and didn't want to touch my other units that they hadn't declared charge against.

Jidmah wrote:

 Inquisitor Lord Katherine wrote:
1: Objective markers are placed before determining deployment zones, and placed by alternating order, 6" in and 12" apart. That basically should say all you need to know about why he didn't and could not place his objective markers safely in his zone. He A: didn't know where his zone would be or even what it would look like, and

As I pointed out, you can place objectives in such a way that they are deep within one deployment zone, no matter what deployment you roll. Defender gets to pick his deployment zone, which means he can always pick the one with two or more objectives in it.

B: had to place his objectives such that they were far enough away from the ones I put down. In general, I try to place objectives in such a way that it prevents my opponent from placing objectives in good positions, like sheltered buildings and board corners. My basic process for objective placement is along the lines as follows: Usually, my first objective goes towards the midboard, just far enough from the edges that the 12"+6" will prevent objectives from being placed further edgeward than it, and usually in the open more than 3" from any good positions or cover.

Such an objective is always within or very close to a deployment zone of you have wedges. Preventing you from blocking it should be possible.

My second objective is usually placed more into the potential zones, but also in the open because I have no guarantee that the one I place it in will be mine. Last one goes somewhere that's left, or is placed aggressively to interfere with the opponent's placement. Some times I shake this up if I'm facing somebody who I don't expect to be able to really last long in the middle against and get my objectives in edges and corners, but it's risky to do that since there's like a 50/50 chance that I could just get completely screwed if I put objectives in safe places and they don't do the same. You usually want to mirror the enemy objective placement. If one player places defensively and one player places aggressively, you stand a chance to just get really screwed if you don't get to pick zones.

The player going second always gets to pick zones. If he doesn't get to pick zones, you can't deny him midfield with the strategy you described.

2: He obviously didn't have a daemon primarch or lord of skulls. You're getting kind of ridiculous here. Beyond just not owning one, I haven't seen a Lord of Skulls on the table for the entire duration of it's existence as a model, a player reasonably new to the game definitely has no expectation owning one much less using one.

Obviously any powerful assault unit would work, including, but not limited to knights, daemon princes, greater daemons or khorn berzerkers. Plus there are lists with tripple Lords of Skulls in tournaments right now, since it has become pretty cheap with last CA. It's also about the mission lockdown in general, not about that specific player. The whole point is that getting too close to your enemy can go wrong in a really bad way and therefore is not a sure-fire way to win that mission.

3: Only units within 1" of the enemy [or charged in the charge phase] are eligible to fight. To the best of my or his understanding, he can't Fury of Khorne an unengaged unit for 6" of movement towards the closest enemy unit.

He can fury of khorne a unit that has charged your infiltrator/deep striker, as it has assaulted this turn.

4: Movement occurs before psychic, shooting, and fighting. He doesn't have an opportunity to clear the screen until after he's been unable to cross it.

Objectives don't disappear in the first turn, so he can clear your screen turn one and move onto objectives turn two. In addition, both are playing had access to warp time, why didn't they use it?

First one didn't have it. I think his psyker knew prescience, but I don't know what other power he knew.
Second one I think got it denied.


Anyway, on the objectives, he doesn't know that he's going to be attacker or defender when he places, and neither do I. That's a definitely inhibition on just placing objectives like that.

Also, and objective 12/sqrt(2)+6 inches in from the board edges is going to be in the mid-board on Dawn of War and Pointy Dawn of War. It will be in but near the edge of the deploy on Hammer and Anvil, Pointy Hammer and Anvil. On Squares and Vanguard Strike, it's going to either be safe or actually in the middle. I think pretty hard about where I'm putting objectives [I don't know if my opponents do or if they just follow my lead, because too be fair, mimicing your opponent's placement is a fairly safe way to place objectives].

Getting close to the enemy wins the mission. If you can't handle being in melee, you're not going to win. All mission packs in play reward multiple-turn occupation of the middle of the board [except maybe Maelstrom], and that's going to bring you into close contact with the enemy force.

Jidmah wrote:

Okay, BR as best as I can reconstruct it [again], since it was like a month and a half ago:

First of all, thanks for doing that.
Understand that I don't want to "win" this argument for the sake of winning, but that I genuinely think that the collection set of CA2019 (and non-maelstrom CA2018) are superior to ITC's single game-warping mission. We have a club which regularly plays on multiple tables and has been a huge enemy of GW's mission in the past, like many. These days, the whole bandwidth of casual to competitive players come asking whether someone has the new CA so they can play the missions from them, as they solve a lot of problems the original BRB missions had and ITC still has. Almost everyone has gotten a bloody nose from playing one of the missions ill prepared, but we are currently in a meta that has evolved from there and bandwidth of units and armies are played is insane compared to what we have experienced in the last ten years of WH40k.

I play in three places. One big store back home with a massive league of like 70 people, which usually plays ITC. One small store at school which spent most of the edition so far playing Maelstrom, despite my efforts to get them to at least play Eternal War. They use CA Eternal War now. The last one is my board gaming club, which consists of a bunch of new people with like 500-1000ea., one guy who was always tangential, and me.

Jidmah wrote:

There was really one major fatal mistake he made, and that was setting up on objective 6, which allowed me to charge it and get on it. The actual choice of objective 6 wasn't bad, I probably would have done the same since it seemed easy to guard, well protected from 3 directions, and just a strong position to be in in general. It was the cultists sitting on it that broke it, since they were an available charge target that without I would have been sitting back in the midfield.

He made other mistakes too, that probably would have added up to him losing the game anyway, but he was less than a year into the hobby and it was his first 1500 points.

I agree with this, him not properly screening out the deep strikers was his loss. In addition, lists like his aren't really strong, i recently tabled a WE in T2 with my ork buggies without actually meaning to do so.
But that isn't really the fault of the mission - had you both played the same and you were running crusade instead of lockdown, you still would have curb-stomped him points-wise.
In general, I stand by my previous analysis. You won a well deserved victory against a less skilled and ill prepared opponent who made multiple fatal mistakes. Nothing wrong with that.

I would probably have beat him in a different mission, but not if I played the way I did, which is more the point. If all the objectives had remained in play, my army was melting because I was making conventionally bad decisions and throwing units away to get points because I was aware that if I built an early lead there wouldn't really an opportunity for him to come back.

He didn't really improperly screen out deep strikers, since he didn't get a chance to move or anything, but by putting cultists on the objective he presented me with a charge target, versus starting off the objective and walking to it on his turn which would have forced me down 9" away from his havocs in the tower with nothing to charge to get the 9-on-2d6 chance to get onto his point.

Jidmah wrote:

In my more recent game on Lockdown, it was less dramatic since I was more conservative and careful about it, but I pulled fundamentally the same trick of zoning in my enemy with Interceptors to prevent them from being able to access points. More recently, I started my warlord on the field and gated him forward so he could give re-rolls to the interceptors on the charge so they could make their charges so I would throw away fewer units and more reliably screen in a greater area [though RoTD also helped me out by upping my lethality between the first game and the second]. This one was also against Chaos, Alpha Legion this time but a superficially similar basic list concept, but a different player. He did better on points, using his AL stratagem toolbox to avoid being completely trapped in, and I played more conservatively with a less rapid win in mind. Also, both 2 and 3 wound up being objectives near or in his zone, which really sucked for him. He wound up conceding after turn three.

What I don't get is how those interceptors are boxing in an army of CSM for two turns. Whatever they charge is dead, sure, but there should be something like havocs, obliterators, a daemon prince or something that can smite behind them that should have no issue killing 30 MEQ, even if they benefiting from the tide of shadows.
I use warbikers or da jumped boyz to do the very same to my opponents, but both tend to be mostly wiped out when turn 2 starts.

As mentioned, I had 3 sections, and one moved in to replace the first one to maintain the containment. Most of his chaincannons went into the GMNDK, which isn't really an efficient use of them, but I think he was panicking about it after it bounced the havocs. To be fair, the GMNDK is very scary, with solid firepower, strong melee, and a 3+ invulnerable save.

Jidmah wrote:

8-0-1 is technically a lot better record than I am on ITC missions [though I've played a lot more than 9 ITC games over the course of this edition], and that showing has been generated with all my factions instead of basically just my sisters of battle and sometimes my guard, but like I've felt like some of my games were just decided by the mission being drawn being massively in my favor, some were just unsatisfying, and some like the aforementioned were really one-sided in a way that I've only experienced in extreme cases in ITC missions. Coming back has also felt really hard in all of them that I played, with my early leads turning into runaway victories with careful play and even small early deficits taking like the rest of the game to claw my way back to win by a point or two [or the draw, which I trailed by 2 points in for the entire game until I matched the score on turn 5 right before the game ended by rolling a 2].

I think the issue here is that your opponent probably don't have a lot of experience with non-ITC missions either and that ITC armies usually don't work really well in CA missions.
We have one guy who always uses netlists with some random units sprinkled in so he can claim that they are "fluffy fun lists" I think he is on a ten game loss streak currently, as ITC lists built to beat ITC lists in ITC games. They forgo units that excel at clearing or defending objectives or threatening the backfield and unit with high mobility or versatility to optimize for killing key threats and certain types of units for secondaries, while avoiding certain options in order to deny opponent scoring.
You are basically gutting yourself for CA missions when you optimize for ITC.

I don't really change my lists between mission packs. ITC rewards taking and holding the middle of the board, while destroying enemy forces and maintaining your own. It's only really the avoiding certain options that I think is meta warping, because I might chose to handicap myself by taking less Guardsmen to discourage my enemy from taking Reaper, or by limiting my motor pool to 3 Exorcists to discourage them from taking Big Game Hunter. Otherwise, you definitely want units that are good at taking and holding objectives, and fill a variety of combat roles.

Crusade also rewards taking and holding, lockdown doesn't reward holding. Lockdown rewards rushing at all cost and accumulating a largely early lead to win quickly.

 Ishagu wrote:

Karol wrote:
A competitor shouldn't be liked, he should be the best .

If 40k was an actual sport and a job where people generated their incomes you might have a point. As it stand, for 99.999% of people this is a voluntary hobby and nothing more.

So you are very wrong, you see. People don't HAVE to be there. They don't HAVE to put up with socially backward individuals.

My favorite line from an opponent was:

"I'm here to win a tournament, not make friends."

I appreciated the candor, and I knew where we stood. I then thoroughly got trashed by his triptide/eldar list. But overall, it was a fairly straightforward, by-the-books game and no complaints from me.

It certainly didn't hurt my feelings.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Melissia wrote:

Karol wrote:
A competitor shouldn't be liked, he should be the best .

If a competitor is a salty little bitch even when s/he wins, and treats his/her opponents like trash, s/he isn't the best.

Just because someone won a tournament doesn't necessitate them being a better player. Especially not in a game with so many random elements as 40k where luck can and will throw games on way or the other with ease. It's very easy to simply luck out one way or the other when you have so few games as a tournament will have, and tournaments can hardly have more games, because of how long games of 40k take.

Please don't google John McEnroe or Curt Schilling then.

 deviantduck wrote:

My favorite line from an opponent was:

"I'm here to win a tournament, not make friends."

I appreciated the candor, and I knew where we stood. I then thoroughly got trashed by his triptide/eldar list. But overall, it was a fairly straightforward, by-the-books game and no complaints from me.

It certainly didn't hurt my feelings.

It sounds like you were both good enough sports then.

Please don't google John McEnroe or Curt Schilling then.

Or any NHL or NFL trash talk on or off the field.

 Inquisitor Lord Katherine wrote:


You can't actually win an ITC mission by not playing the game and ticking boxes. At the very minimum you have to either take the middle or destroy more enemy units than you lose to stay competitive, and probably do both at least a couple of times to win.

You can - but a competent opponent will realise what is happening early enough and try to do something about it. Look at the stream of the LVO semi-final if you need to see what I mean. Sean Nayden had more secondary point potential if he could just avoid actually having a game so he hid everything behind LOS block with the plan of jumping out on the last turn and grabbing a couple more secondaries for the win.

A less good opponent would not do the maths in their head to realise that they need to make a rush across the table early enough in the game to still win it.

happy_inquisitor wrote:
You can - but a competent opponent will realise what is happening early enough and try to do something about it. Look at the stream of the LVO semi-final if you need to see what I mean. Sean Nayden had more secondary point potential if he could just avoid actually having a game so he hid everything behind LOS block with the plan of jumping out on the last turn and grabbing a couple more secondaries for the win.

A less good opponent would not do the maths in their head to realise that they need to make a rush across the table early enough in the game to still win it.

It's actually pretty cool that a unique game like that can happen under ITC rules and it does seem to be unique, unless there are other examples people can cite where the same thing happened.

In my opinion, rewarding a non-game is a sign of a huge problem in a ruleset.

 Jidmah wrote:
In my opinion, rewarding a non-game is a sign of a huge problem in a ruleset.

Agreed, although being able to opt towards non violence to secure strategic victories might be realistic, it seems fundamentally wrong for a game such as 40k.

Scoring points exclusively through camping secondaries reminds me of the time my wife tried Gorkamorka. It’s a game about mobs of orks riding into the desert looking for scraps. She drove up to the scrap, loaded it into her truck and drove it off the board. I don’t think anyone has ever played the scenario in that game before and it blew my mind. There was almost no fighting, except when she ran down and killed my nob as she passed. She didn’t seem to realise the real scrap was the mobs you maul along the way. I think ITC has been playing tournament pack in the way my wife plays gorkamorka.

 Jidmah wrote:
In my opinion, rewarding a non-game is a sign of a huge problem in a ruleset.

Like putting 200 Gretchin down in Eternal War and mobbing the objectives? That's exactly what kill points and the ITC kill primary is all about, preventing non-games. From what I understand you need not only win all your games in an ITC tournament, you also need to score high, it's only single knock-out games like pick-up games and finals were you're not punished for having a low-scoring game. If you're not maxing out your secondaries and getting a good chunk of hold, hold-more, kill and kill more you can say good-bye to a top 4 placement even if you never lose a game. The games I've had that were non-games because neither of us got an advantage from poking our heads too far forwards (these were mostly ITC) were more fun and interesting than the games where one player just got blown off the table. Engaging games where both players are trying to at least kill some of their opponent's list, trying to hold at least some objectives and you don't lose more than 50% of your army until the start of turn 3 would be ideal. The hold secondaries getting buffed in ITC should mean a larger incentive for not playing as cagey and instead going around the map.

 vict0988 wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:
In my opinion, rewarding a non-game is a sign of a huge problem in a ruleset.

Like putting 200 Gretchin down in Eternal War and mobbing the objectives? That's exactly what kill points and the ITC kill primary is all about, preventing non-games. From what I understand you need not only win all your games in an ITC tournament, you also need to score high, it's only single knock-out games like pick-up games and finals were you're not punished for having a low-scoring game. If you're not maxing out your secondaries and getting a good chunk of hold, hold-more, kill and kill more you can say good-bye to a top 4 placement even if you never lose a game. The games I've had that were non-games because neither of us got an advantage from poking our heads too far forwards (these were mostly ITC) were more fun and interesting than the games where one player just got blown off the table. Engaging games where both players are trying to at least kill some of their opponent's list, trying to hold at least some objectives and you don't lose more than 50% of your army until the start of turn 3 would be ideal. The hold secondaries getting buffed in ITC should mean a larger incentive for not playing as cagey and instead going around the map.

200 gretchin easily winning EW missions is an urban myth. This is a prime example of ITC fixing a problem that doesn't exist.

 vict0988 wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:
In my opinion, rewarding a non-game is a sign of a huge problem in a ruleset.

Like putting 200 Gretchin down in Eternal War and mobbing the objectives? That's exactly what kill points and the ITC kill primary is all about, preventing non-games. From what I understand you need not only win all your games in an ITC tournament, you also need to score high, it's only single knock-out games like pick-up games and finals were you're not punished for having a low-scoring game. If you're not maxing out your secondaries and getting a good chunk of hold, hold-more, kill and kill more you can say good-bye to a top 4 placement even if you never lose a game. The games I've had that were non-games because neither of us got an advantage from poking our heads too far forwards (these were mostly ITC) were more fun and interesting than the games where one player just got blown off the table. Engaging games where both players are trying to at least kill some of their opponent's list, trying to hold at least some objectives and you don't lose more than 50% of your army until the start of turn 3 would be ideal. The hold secondaries getting buffed in ITC should mean a larger incentive for not playing as cagey and instead going around the map.

again with the boogeyman of 'but Hordes'.

Where are the hordes winning tournament after tournament in ETC/WTC/CA tournaments? Why hasn't it been a thing since the days of Index vs Index armies?

 Ordana wrote:

 vict0988 wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:
In my opinion, rewarding a non-game is a sign of a huge problem in a ruleset.

Like putting 200 Gretchin down in Eternal War and mobbing the objectives? That's exactly what kill points and the ITC kill primary is all about, preventing non-games. From what I understand you need not only win all your games in an ITC tournament, you also need to score high, it's only single knock-out games like pick-up games and finals were you're not punished for having a low-scoring game. If you're not maxing out your secondaries and getting a good chunk of hold, hold-more, kill and kill more you can say good-bye to a top 4 placement even if you never lose a game. The games I've had that were non-games because neither of us got an advantage from poking our heads too far forwards (these were mostly ITC) were more fun and interesting than the games where one player just got blown off the table. Engaging games where both players are trying to at least kill some of their opponent's list, trying to hold at least some objectives and you don't lose more than 50% of your army until the start of turn 3 would be ideal. The hold secondaries getting buffed in ITC should mean a larger incentive for not playing as cagey and instead going around the map.

again with the boogeyman of 'but Hordes'.

Where are the hordes winning tournament after tournament in ETC/WTC/CA tournaments? Why hasn't it been a thing since the days of Index vs Index armies?

I feel like people are actively forgetting the massively increased firepower of infantry guns accross the board.
As someone that actually plays a horde army, doesn't matter if ITC or not ITC is on, i am on the recivieng end of a bad time with just an horde build, unless i run into a build overstocking on AT guns massively.

Not Online!!! wrote:
unless i run into a build overstocking on AT guns massively.

You might have found out why hordes would be penalized.

dhallnet wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:
unless i run into a build overstocking on AT guns massively.

You might have found out why hordes would be penalized.

So Hordes should be penalised because you cant be arsed to bring a list to a tournament that is capable of having a chance in every matchup?
Rock is fine, nerf scissors said the paper.

Again I say, Hordes are not dominating outside of ITC. You are afraid of a boogeyman that does not exist.

Jidmah wrote:In my opinion, rewarding a non-game is a sign of a huge problem in a ruleset.

nareik wrote:Agreed, although being able to opt towards non violence to secure strategic victories might be realistic, it seems fundamentally wrong for a game such as 40k.

In my experience, this is worst in objective conditions based on the state of the board at the end of the game, but largely mitigated through progressive scoring.

If the scenario is contingent on one or a number of objectives and you score points for each turn you hold them, camping in the back for a last-turn swoop-in is a complete non-starter.

Edit: Waves of Grots/Guardsmen dominating the board is not a thing. It wasn't happening a year ago, and it certainly isn't happening in the current Marine meta. Even if you don't have the firepower to simply kill the horde, there's a physical limit to how many models can fit on an objective- if you're the non-horde player, you can take the second turn, kill enough models to get the opponent off the objective or just outnumber them with your Troops, and win on objectives.

Hordes are great in planet bowling ball spherical vacuum Theoryhammer where all we look at are the raw numbers. Put them down on a table with adequate terrain and they are a complete pain in the ass to handle; and that's even with 100-150 model armies, not 200+ ones.

Compactness is highly underrated.

 Ordana wrote:

dhallnet wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:
unless i run into a build overstocking on AT guns massively.

You might have found out why hordes would be penalized.

So Hordes should be penalised because you cant be arsed to bring a list to a tournament that is capable of having a chance in every matchup?
Rock is fine, nerf scissors said the paper.

Again I say, Hordes are not dominating outside of ITC. You are afraid of a boogeyman that does not exist.

I'm not saying they should ?
I'm merely saying that with a game ranging from nurglings to knights, I wouldn't be surprised if there was an effort to tighten this scale in a "competitive homebrew". And considering most lists I looked at were rather on the "a lot of AT" side (or enough medium sized guns/other means of dealing with vehicles) than "can easily deal with 200 dudes", this might be it. Particularly when you consider how long knights were the boogeydudes.
I might be totally wrong though.

dhallnet wrote:

 Ordana wrote:

dhallnet wrote:

Not Online!!! wrote:
unless i run into a build overstocking on AT guns massively.

You might have found out why hordes would be penalized.

So Hordes should be penalised because you cant be arsed to bring a list to a tournament that is capable of having a chance in every matchup?
Rock is fine, nerf scissors said the paper.

Again I say, Hordes are not dominating outside of ITC. You are afraid of a boogeyman that does not exist.

I'm not saying they should ?
I'm merely saying that with a game ranging from nurglings to knights, I wouldn't be surprised if there was an effort to tighten this scale in a "competitive homebrew". And considering most lists I looked at were rather on the "a lot of AT" side (or enough medium sized guns/other means of dealing with vehicles) than "can easily deal with 200 dudes", this might be it. Particularly when you consider how long knights were the boogeydudes.
I might be totally wrong though.

Look at it the other way. By hammering on Hordes with homebrew rules armies could freely focus on 1 end of the spectrum and skew lists towards big stuff and anti big stuff.
What if ITC wasn't so anti-horde? Would Knights have been as dominant or would they have worried more about facing hordes where 5 models, no matter how big their guns, just can't deal with them fast enough? (I say 'as dominant' because lets be real Knights would still have been pretty dominant before the nerfs)
Same with Eldar Fliers, the army loses a lot of its power when the board has a whole bunch of infantry units where all the Bright Lances and Pulse Lasers are a waste and the infantry doesn't give up a load of easy secondary points. Maybe you would see less 6 flyer lists and only 3 or 4 max because more points would be needed to ensure the list can deal with Hordes.

To point back to the incredibly oversimplified example of rock, paper, scissors. If you remove Scissors its no wonder that Paper ends of dominating the meta.

 Ordana wrote:

 vict0988 wrote:

 Jidmah wrote:
In my opinion, rewarding a non-game is a sign of a huge problem in a ruleset.

Like putting 200 Gretchin down in Eternal War and mobbing the objectives? That's exactly what kill points and the ITC kill primary is all about, preventing non-games. From what I understand you need not only win all your games in an ITC tournament, you also need to score high, it's only single knock-out games like pick-up games and finals were you're not punished for having a low-scoring game. If you're not maxing out your secondaries and getting a good chunk of hold, hold-more, kill and kill more you can say good-bye to a top 4 placement even if you never lose a game. The games I've had that were non-games because neither of us got an advantage from poking our heads too far forwards (these were mostly ITC) were more fun and interesting than the games where one player just got blown off the table. Engaging games where both players are trying to at least kill some of their opponent's list, trying to hold at least some objectives and you don't lose more than 50% of your army until the start of turn 3 would be ideal. The hold secondaries getting buffed in ITC should mean a larger incentive for not playing as cagey and instead going around the map.

again with the boogeyman of 'but Hordes'.

Where are the hordes winning tournament after tournament in ETC/WTC/CA tournaments? Why hasn't it been a thing since the days of Index vs Index armies?

1. TBH I don't really know where to look for ETC/WTC/CA results. Is there a centralised repo where I can find them?
2. Maybe its just an Australia thing, but hordes have definitely been alive here in both ETC and ITC missions. And the handful of CA tournaments I've been to were all won by hordes.
My experience with running between 120-180 plaguebearers got me 5-1 at (ETC-style mixed mission) tournaments for most of 2018 and 2019. Struggled a bit as firepower went up but our terrain didn't change to match.

And I can only assume that an event format that focuses more on objective control than killing is going to have more hordes until people build dedicated anti-horde armies.
(this has dropped off drastically since the release of Marines 2.0 due the unprecedented levels of firepower in any mode of the game)

Some examples from Cancon, Australia's ITC Finals torunament.
Cancon 2020 the only non-Marines in the top 10 were hordes. https://www.bestcoastpairings.com/r/lyu3x2p0
4th. Genestealer Cult Horde
6th. Gretchin Horde

Cancon 2019 the top 10 was dominated by hordes. https://www.reddit.com/r/WarhammerCompetitive/comments/aku3y2/cancon_itc_championship_tournament_result_140/
(And this was in peak Knight Castellan / Ynarri power build time)
1st. 150 Termagant Horde
3rd. 120 Plaguebearer Horde
4th. 90+ Gretchin horde
6th. 135 Assorted Chaos Horde
8th. 180 Plaguebearer + 30 Bletter horde
10th 110 Plaguebearer +40 Bletter Horde

ETC 2019. https://www.glasshammergaming.co.uk/2019/07/09/etclists/
I didn't count them all, but it looks like at least half the teams had one plaguebearer horde. Not sure how many Ork, Tzaangor, or Tyranid horde were there.

90 gretchin is not a horde. That's bringing the minimum troop requirement for orks.

Half of the time when players say "hordes are a problem" they actually mean "plague bearers are a problem"

It's also worth noting that multiple players from those confirmed that they brought high model counts to counter knights. Meanwhile in ITC, there was no counter.

 Jidmah wrote:
90 gretchin is not a horde. That's bringing the minimum troop requirement for orks.

Damn my argument is ruined! the other 5 horde armies disappear as well.
Personally I think 90 gretchin counts, because it does all the horde things (soak up your firepower on trivial units, has good board control, screening for the damaging characters) but there were also another 50 meganobz/lootas/tankbustas. If there's 150 models on the field is that somehow less of a horde than one with 120 plaguebearers?

Half of the time when players say "hordes are a problem" they actually mean "plague bearers are a problem"

There are also gretchin, boyz, termagant, acolyte, tzaangor hordes all in there.

It's also worth noting that multiple players from those confirmed that they brought high model counts to counter knights. Meanwhile in ITC, there was no counter.

Well those events were ITC so....
Plus weren't we just saying that ITC discourages hordes via Reaper and Kill More secondaries?

 Jidmah wrote:
90 gretchin is not a horde. That's bringing the minimum troop requirement for orks.

Half of the time when players say "hordes are a problem" they actually mean "plague bearers are a problem"

It's also worth noting that multiple players from those confirmed that they brought high model counts to counter knights. Meanwhile in ITC, there was no counter.

What the hell are you talking about? The dominant lists for most the ITC 2019 season were Plaguebearer spam Chaos and Genestealer Cults. Ork hordes also did well but underperformed because players went heavily into Lootas which generally broke down against Eldar planes which could stop their defensive strat. Chaos Cultist horde was strong before that, and Guard are perennial contenders in ITC precisely because they're great at going 2nd in the format and using their cheap, flexible troops to score well in the primary.

The thing that changed the horde meta was external to ITC - new Marines which efficiently kill low-quality models, the Cultist changes to make them more expensive and worse at the same time, the point increase to Plaguebearers for Chaos and Aberrants for GSC. It has nothing to do with the ITC missions, where putting down a large number of models that could hold mid-board was a winning strategy right up until the ability to keep that horde on the table was threatened by massed bolters and Thunderfire Cannons.