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Ice_can wrote:
That might have been the intention, and maybe it's partly using old points and partly the battle reps all being people rushing to bring out content but some of the secondarys seem to be almost auto discarded by a number of players and a number are automatically 15 points that doesnt sound like it is improving viability it seems like they just aren't well balanced against each other.

At the moment it kinda seems like their is a lot of impression of choice but that people doing well seem to have a number of secondarys incommon seems to say they may just have missed the mark on balance a tad.

So far the worst offender for broken seems to be kill.my 3 Chaplin dreadnaughts, because LoLs we spacemarines and we shall know No unfavourable rules.

Seems to be playing out according to intention in many batreps I'm watching.

MVBrandt wrote:

Ice_can wrote:
That might have been the intention, and maybe it's partly using old points and partly the battle reps all being people rushing to bring out content but some of the secondarys seem to be almost auto discarded by a number of players and a number are automatically 15 points that doesnt sound like it is improving viability it seems like they just aren't well balanced against each other.

At the moment it kinda seems like their is a lot of impression of choice but that people doing well seem to have a number of secondarys incommon seems to say they may just have missed the mark on balance a tad.

So far the worst offender for broken seems to be kill.my 3 Chaplin dreadnaughts, because LoLs we spacemarines and we shall know No unfavourable rules.

Seems to be playing out according to intention in many batreps I'm watching.

Impossible to loose plsying marines yeah great news for anyone not interested in playing marines.

Turn 1 advantage seems too high. ITC finally ironed this out after years of trying and created a ruleset where going second was actually arguably even superior. But progressive scoring and deploying before you know who's going first removes all the advantages of going second, and replaces them with nothing I can see except an advantage on kill more if you choose it and with knowing what score you have to beat on your last turn (both of which you had anyway under the old system), but those don't seem nearly enough to erode the advantage of getting onto the objectives first.

I am hopeful the tournament missions will be better structured to balance first and second turn, but I'm also not sure what the thinking was on the eternal war pack as to why first-turn advantage wasn't flagged as an issue.

I am always open to the possibility that I am just not very good at the game and smarter people than me can demonstrate that the first turn advantage isn't as large as it has been in my games, but so far I haven't seen it done.

I would think any army able to bully their opponent off of objectives would have the advantage when going second. Most of the primary objectives require you to hold the objective during your Command phase and cannot be scored on Turn 1.

So while the player going first can jump on them, if the second player has an army that can assault those units and push them off the objective, they actually have the advantage, right?

Exactly, the first players get initiative, but the second player gets more information before it has to make a decision. The first player has to move on to objectives first and weather the opponent to score. The second player also has a huge advantage for reserves. They get to pick where they reinforce, or whether they bring in those reinforcements at all, based on their opponent's gameplan.

Bear in mind, the leaks we've seen are actually missing a couple pages detailing the new guidelines for the AMOUNT of terrain to be used (pgs 266-269). Given how much everything else has mirrored the ITC rules, that will probably give enough terrain to blunt an enemy's alpha strike.

The new terrain rules heavily favor going second imo. If you deploy conservatively the person who goes first might have nothing to shoot while you're behind terrain; then your turn comes around, put a toe into the terrain and you can shoot at the stuff they moved forward.

Especially given that there's no way to reliably go first, building for alpha strikes looks really bad in 9th.

 alextroy wrote:
I would think any army able to bully their opponent off of objectives would have the advantage when going second. Most of the primary objectives require you to hold the objective during your Command phase and cannot be scored on Turn 1.

So while the player going first can jump on them, if the second player has an army that can assault those units and push them off the objective, they actually have the advantage, right?

No. Because the scoring is all at the beginning of your command phase, not at the end of the battle round.

If all scoring happened at the end of the battle round instead of the beginning of the player who is scoring's turn, it would indeed encourage going second. As is, there is virtually no advantage to going second that I can see, except for being able to manage the kill more secondary. Even the hold more secondary is, oddly, resolved at the end of your turn, not the end of the battle round, so going second doesn't help that one either - it actually hurts it, since the player going first gets it pretty much automatically on T1 if they want it.

The issue isn't alpha strike, you win these missions by holding, not by killing. Having the first chance to get onto the objectives is a huge advantage when scoring isn't at the end of the battle round.

Edit: Reserves is the one thing where you arguably do have an advantage, since you get the final chance to deploy. But if you're waiting until T3 to deploy, you're not scoring anything with those models until T4, so that's leaving things awfully late. You also have to decide whether to reserve before you know whether you're going first, so if you reserve a significant portion of your forces and go second, you're facing an even greater uphill struggle to overcome the initial advantage the player going first gets by getting onto the objectives first.

yukishiro1 wrote:

 alextroy wrote:
I would think any army able to bully their opponent off of objectives would have the advantage when going second. Most of the primary objectives require you to hold the objective during your Command phase and cannot be scored on Turn 1.

So while the player going first can jump on them, if the second player has an army that can assault those units and push them off the objective, they actually have the advantage, right?

No. Because the scoring is all at the beginning of your command phase, not at the end of the battle round.

If all scoring happened at the end of the battle round instead of the beginning of the player who is scoring's turn, it would indeed encourage going second. As is, there is virtually no advantage to going second that I can see, except for being able to manage the kill more secondary. Even the hold more secondary is, oddly, resolved at the end of your turn, not the end of the battle round, so going second doesn't help that one either - it actually hurts it, since the player going first gets it pretty much automatically on T1 if they want it.

The point isn't that the second player can score objectives without retaliation. You are correct, the second player cannot move on to objectives and immediately score them. Alextroy's point, however, is that the first player has to make their units vulnerable by moving up and getting on the objective first.

Imagine, for example, the first player moves up to a center field objective. That player won't have the movement to cross no-man's land and assault their opponent. However, by moving to the middle, the first player is now in assault range of the second player.

Or another example, since you don't know who is going first until after deployment, both armies will deploy largely out of LoS. The first player needs to move into LoS to begin scoring. That means the second player the first opportunity to shoot at them out of cover.

All of that would matter in a game about killing. But these missions are all about holding, not killing. Going first with progressive scoring gives two massive advantages. You not only get onto the objectives first - which means you can screen out your opponent's ability to contest them unless they can assault you off - you also have a huge advantage at the bottom of the game, because you score your last set of points before the other guy - which means that once you've scored, you can throw everything at stopping the other player from scoring, with no need to continue to hold. This doesn't even have to be T5 - you can very conceivably max out your primary by the start of T4 - or only need one back-field objective to do it, which is almost the same thing - and then be able to play complete offense during the whole last two turns of the game, just focusing on denying your opponent.

I've played two games so far, and the game I went first was effectively over once we rolled to see who went first. There was literally no possible way for him to win. Part of this was that we rolled the mission with the central objective, and that one is even more "go first wins" than the others - I don't think you could create a mission with greater first turn advantage if you tried - but I don't see how he could have won on any of the other missions either.

The second game, where I went second, was closer, but only because my list was so much better at playing the missions than his.

All that said, I am working on the assumption that these are not the missions used for tournament play, so while I'm not sure why they seem so tilted to going first, I'm not going to care very much if they're not very competitive as long as there are competitive alternatives.

yukishiro1 wrote:
Going first with progressive scoring gives two massive advantages. You not only get onto the objectives first - which means you can screen out your opponent's ability to contest them unless they can assault you off - you also have a huge advantage at the bottom of the game, because you score your last set of points before the other guy - which means that once you've scored, you can throw everything at stopping the other player from scoring, with no need to continue to hold. This doesn't even have to be T5 - you can very conceivably max out your primary by the start of T4 - or only need one back-field objective to do it, which is almost the same thing - and then be able to play complete offense during the whole last two turns of the game, just focusing on denying your opponent.

To your first point, you have the advantage of being on the objective first, but the disadvantage of being exposed in the midfield. The amount that is an advantage is extremely match-up dependent, though certain armies like hordes would consistently utilize it. To your second point, it's technically true that you can max out your primary on turn 4, but that situations where that occurs are already a blow-out game in your favour. In reality, that's going to happen very rarely between two even lists.

I've played two games so far, and the game I went first was effectively over once we rolled to see who went first. There was literally no possible way for him to win. Part of this was that we rolled the mission with the central objective, and that one is even more "go first wins" than the others - I don't think you could create a mission with greater first turn advantage if you tried - but I don't see how he could have won on any of the other missions either.

I mean, that just seems like poor play in list building and strategy. I assume you mean No Man's Land, which has the secondary for scoring the center objective. That objective is worth the points equal to the Battle Round number, so the first round is worth 1 point and the last round is worth 5. The only way to score the maximum 15 points for that secondary is to hold it uninterrupted the entire game.

And that's just a secondary, the opponent doesn't have to take that mission or even care about the central objective at all. They can focus on controlling 3 other objectives, and take secondaries that don't engage with the middle of the board like Linebreaker, Domination, Repair Teleport Homer, etc..

Have you played any games? The point is it isn't a blow-out, it's just what happens when you go first with a decent list that's good at holding stuff.

The mission with the central objective has huge first-turn advantage, and it's got nothing to do with that bad secondary, which you have to choose before you know who goes first, BTW, so if you do take it, not going after the center isn't an option. I took it, but only because I was taking the power combo with psychic ritual (which I don't think is very good except on this mission).

The basic problem with it is that whoever is in the center - and the player who goes first has the option to be that person - can easily threaten all the objectives on the board, but if you aren't in the center, you can threaten only the center unless you have huge mobility in your army. This makes it much easier for the person in the middle to hold more, and then you can combo off that with secondaries to create a situation where if your opponent isn't capable of shifting you off the center by the end of T3, you basically just win.

Terrible list match-ups or terrible rolling aside, I struggle to see how anyone reliably wins this mission going second unless they play T'au, and if they can, it's just because T'au win the mission as soon as it is rolled.

Again obviously maybe I'm just a moron and haven't spotted something. One game isn't enough to draw solid conclusions from. But the game was downright dire.

yukishiro1 wrote:
Have you played any games? The point is it isn't a blow-out, it's just what happens when you go first with a decent list that's good at holding stuff.

You're saying a player who goes first and is "good at holding objectives" will typically score 45 primary points at the start of turn 4? If you're consistently holding more objectives than your opponent for every round of every game, then you owe it to yourself to rampage through the tournament scene. It is simply not the case that the player who goes first automatically holds more than their opponent for the rest of the game.

The mission with the central objective has huge first-turn advantage, and it's got nothing to do with that bad secondary, which you have to choose before you know who goes first, BTW, so if you do take it, not going after the center isn't an option. I took it, but only because I was taking the power combo with psychic ritual (which I don't think is very good except on this mission).

The basic problem with it is that whoever is in the center - and the player who goes first has the option to be that person - can easily threaten all the objectives on the board, but if you aren't in the center, you can threaten only the center unless you have huge mobility in your army. This makes it much easier for the person in the middle to hold more, and then you can combo off that with secondaries to create a situation where if your opponent isn't capable of shifting you off the center by the end of T3, you basically just win.

If we want to analyze that match in particular we'd need to know a little more info about the armies involved, the secondaries chosen, and the set-up terrain. I can't believe that pushing the opponent off an objective is outright impossible, unless the match-up is very skewed.

By the time you choose secondaries, you know the mission and your opponent's list. You should be able to identify "if he takes an objective and sits on it, I'm going to have a hard time pushing him off." In the case, you shouldn't take any missions that say 'hold a particular objective' because you can't be sure you will.

What were you guys playing such that your opponent had no hope of interacting with your gameplan?

No, read what I actually said please. I said they will frequently end up at T4 either maxed or close to it, which is essentially the same thing as unless you are tabled, holding a single objective isn't tough. Going first means you're strongly favored to do 15 points on T1. If you then just manage to hold more one of the next two turns, you're in a strong position to 5 points from maxed. It looks to me like the player who goes second is typically going to be looking at a ~10 point deficit on the primary going into your T4, which is difficult to overcome unless you table your opponent that turn.

I don't think theorycrafting this further is going to be a productive use of time. Go play some games and come back and see if you don't find that going first is a very strong advantage with the current missions. I hope very much your experience is different from mine.

Had a small game with a friend last night using the released 9 th ed rules booklet and a handful of the leaked larger book, just to get a taste of of it.

Our experience is pretty positive really. The biggest thing for us was overwatch being restricted to stratagem.
It gave me the option to use it where I needed it, but gave my buddy playing slaanesh daemons and actual chance to play the game. For the first time in ages, he managed to get into combat without being wiped away by overwatching flamers.
It made for a better play experience for him and for me and through this change alone, made for a much closer and (for us) enjoyable game.

If you score at the start of the turn, doesn't that then mean that in the final turn of the game the player going second has no chance to recover, as nothing they do will affect the outcome of the objectives that have been scored?

I just got my first game of 9th in [SW v. SM [RG] @1500]. Here are my insights:

The 5" vertical engagement range was really awkward to use, especially because it's so much larger than the models themselves. It made it really easy to make charges to targets, and made having the high ground a liability more than a benefit. If you have multiple units vertical in a building, one guy charging the bottom unit engages effectively the entire vertical tower without trying any harder. More on that later. -- Big negative.
Overwatch for a stratagem is a waste of time; if it costs a stratagem, it should hit on natural BS. -- eh. basically amounts to "removed overwatch" which is like fine. Net neutral.
The CP/turn was reasonably nice. I used it to effectively get Transhuman Physiology all game. I'm increasingly of the opinion that maybe the starting allocation should be lowered and the amount per turn increased. -- Net Positive.
The terrain rules in general are a mess. Things being infinitely-high columns of providing their effect is A: awkward and B: makes having high ground and setting up in buildings really just a thing not to do, since you can't actually use the height to see over things and for some reason defending the top of an object or a window or a doorway is an active liability in close quarters. We had a lot of terrain of different types and really put it through it's paces, and weren't really satisfied and just found it to be too abstracted and too much of a mess. -- Net negative.
Reduced fight range. This made stringing out our units to hold objective and fight units actually take models out of the fight, so I'd say it's a net positive. It is a little awkward that engagement range is so long but after that it's so short. -- net positive.


We didn't use the horde/blast rules, we were basically all MSU, so we didn't end up with an issue there. -- unknown
We were both Marines and MSU, so Morale is still essentially meaningless. -- negative or unknown
We didn't wind up with any vehicles in close quarters combat. -- unknown.



One thing to note was how much better the game was with fewer points. We played on a regular table, but the opening up of space to play the game in and for units to maneuver and act and have to cover with fewer units really did make the game feel a lot better. I look forward to the cost of units generally going up.

Each player scores at the start of their turn. It's a big shift from ITC where it was by battle round. It means both players can conceivably score hold more in the same battle round.

It does mean that on T5, only the player who goes first can do anything to impact the primary, which means they can go all out to stop whatever scoring the player going second has set up, without having to worry about leaving stuff exposed.

MVBrandt wrote:

 Inquisitor Lord Katherine wrote:

???

They didn't seem so to me. Almost any progressive-scoring mission has the problem of being able to accumulate an insurmountable early lead where there's not enough points on the table to turn the game in the later turns, making them irrelevant. It's fundamentally at odds with the principle behind progressive scoring, which is to incentiveize early game aggression, increase the importance of holding a position as opposed to taking it in the last turn, and emphasize the importance of movement and position in the early game by moving points further forward in the game.
If it's possible to overturn a strong lead in the last turn, then it basically turns into an end-of-game scoring mission where what you do before the last turn position and scoring wise might as well not matter.

It's more the ability to catch up then the ability to overturn. Both players still have a cap on how many they can earn from each objective. One of the big flaws in most progressive mission design is, in fact, the absence of a point cap on criteria. Without the cap, games get out of reach well before they end, reducing scoring tension and creating a greater incidence of concessions at the Turn 3 or so point. IN this format, you incentivize early aggression for a lead, but it isn't the *only* way, expanding the variety of ways in which you can win a game, and thus expanding the variety of lists which constitute viability toward success.

A maximum points gain per turn doesn't help, because if effectively stymies any comeback potential to the same degree it "limits a lead", if not more.

Scoring at the beginning of the turn is also a net wash, because it also limits running away with the score.... but it also makes coming back that much harder since you need to be starting your comeback even earlier to make up the difference.

All in all, it shifts the importance even further forward in the game and further increases the power of early aggression and decreases the importance of late turns.

Automatically Appended Next Post:

yukishiro1 wrote:
Each player scores at the start of their turn. It's a big shift from ITC where it was by battle round. It means both players can conceivably score hold more in the same battle round.

It does mean that on T5, only the player who goes first can do anything to impact the primary, which means they can go all out to stop whatever scoring the player going second has set up, without having to worry about leaving stuff exposed.

That seems like a real edge case. If I scored hold more at the start of my turn, I would have to willfully abandon an objective for you to score hold more

It's not, really. You can leave one guy on each of your objectives and throw everything else at them to get them off theirs, which they can't do back to you because it's too late.

It works out to a significant advantage on T1 and on T5 on the primary for the person who goes first. Seeing as that's now 40% of the game...a significant advantage on 40% of the game is, well, significant.

yukishiro1 wrote:
It's not, really. You can leave one guy on each of your objectives and throw everything else at them to get them off theirs, which they can't do back to you because it's too late.

It works out to a significant advantage on T1 and on T5 on the primary for the person who goes first. Seeing as that's now 40% of the game...a significant advantage on 40% of the game is, well, significant.

Aircraft? Flyers?

The Tabletop Titans guys did #6, which has the rule that lets you hold the objective even if you move off, which really favored Custodes. Dropping bikes onto four objectives turn 1 set the tone for sure. Not all missions are like this and likely the tournament missions will be different as well. I probably wouldn't have bothered with the telemon.

Even if you lose turn 1 if you're able to take it back you need only 3 turns to max it out. I imagine some people might think they need to push it all back immediately, but driving towards one half of the board will even you out and puts your opponent at only 5 points of advantage. A scoring of 10/15/10/10 gets you maxed - or even 5/10/15/15.

If the opponent makes a hard drive and they don't get a strong alpha strike in then the counter punch can set your primaries up pretty well.

I did enjoy the CA19 setup stuff, but I'm willing to give this a go. The secondaries seem to have put Ishagu into hiding.

He probably doesn't want to admit the ITC influence.

 H.B.M.C. wrote:
If you score at the start of the turn, doesn't that then mean that in the final turn of the game the player going second has no chance to recover, as nothing they do will affect the outcome of the objectives that have been scored?

It's sort of a symmetrical effect. The second player can interfere with the first player's objectives on turn 1, which the first player can't reciprocate until turn 2. Then on turn 5, the first player can interfere with the second player's scoring for turn 5, but the second player can't reciprocate. The amount this matters is going to depend a lot on the match-up and strategy. As Yukishiro1 points out, taking the objective first can screen out armies ill-suited to retake them. Some assault oriented armies will have a huge advantage pushing off enemies now in range in the center of the board. Some shooting armies may not have the firepower to dislodge the objective, and will fall behind on tempo.

While neither player can score primaries from their actions on the 5th turn, it is an important time to finish secondaries. Many secondaries score on end of turn and end of game (and sometimes both), so the player going second also cannot be stopped from scoring them.

Martel732 wrote:
He probably doesn't want to admit the ITC influence.

If GW wanted to reunite the ITC players and the CA players, they needed to compromise between the two formats, not just select one and discard the other.

In this, I think that they made a really good work. The new missions have all the main features of both CA and ITC missions.

The seconday mission system is good when you tier it much more toward objective control, integrate it with the action system and make it so that the killing missions are only applicable against skew lists.

At the same time they kept the scoring at the start of the turn from CA, removed any possible reward for killing (being tabled is again fine) and kept a good array of different mission conditions and deployments.

You have agency in selecting your objectives based on the situation, which was the best feature of ITC.
You have to act under non-standardized conditions, so you can't come into the game with a full plan, which was the best feature of CA19.

I didn't get a game in yet, but I'm fairly optimist that they managed to create a mission packet which is better than both previous ones.

One thing to remember at this stage is most people aren't using the updated points for 9th edition (I think the Tabletop Tactics guys did in their games) and from what I've seen most people haven't really adjusted their armies for the new edition. We'll likely see quite a few tactical errors in the first few weeks as people get their heads around the missions, scoring and what types of armies work best so it will be difficult to draw a full picture at the moment.

Spoletta wrote:

Martel732 wrote:
He probably doesn't want to admit the ITC influence.

If GW wanted to reunite the ITC players and the CA players, they needed to compromise between the two formats, not just select one and discard the other.

In this, I think that they made a really good work. The new missions have all the main features of both CA and ITC missions.

The seconday mission system is good when you tier it much more toward objective control, integrate it with the action system and make it so that the killing missions are only applicable against skew lists.

At the same time they kept the scoring at the start of the turn from CA, removed any possible reward for killing (being tabled is again fine) and kept a good array of different mission conditions and deployments.

You have agency in selecting your objectives based on the situation, which was the best feature of ITC.
You have to act under non-standardized conditions, so you can't come into the game with a full plan, which was the best feature of CA19.

I didn't get a game in yet, but I'm fairly optimist that they managed to create a mission packet which is better than both previous ones.

Yeah, the missions seem pretty good.

Slipspace wrote:
One thing to remember at this stage is most people aren't using the updated points for 9th edition (I think the Tabletop Tactics guys did in their games) and from what I've seen most people haven't really adjusted their armies for the new edition. We'll likely see quite a few tactical errors in the first few weeks as people get their heads around the missions, scoring and what types of armies work best so it will be difficult to draw a full picture at the moment.

TT did not. I think everyone has 8th ed points.

Slipspace wrote:
One thing to remember at this stage is most people aren't using the updated points for 9th edition (I think the Tabletop Tactics guys did in their games) and from what I've seen most people haven't really adjusted their armies for the new edition. We'll likely see quite a few tactical errors in the first few weeks as people get their heads around the missions, scoring and what types of armies work best so it will be difficult to draw a full picture at the moment.

I made a f***ton of errors, yeah. Most of it from terrain and what terrain did.
Also, I forgot to count end of game scoring when we adjourned, thus depriving me of a point [though in my defense, my opponent said there wasn't any more scoring after the beginning of my turn]
Also, a made a bunch of tactical errors, but that's probably because I hadn't played in a while and was also playing in the general mindset of the old CA and ITC missions.

BA players have to rebuild from the ground up, and it's kicking and screaming all the way from what I have read so far.

Not sure about other marines.

Can you be a bit more specific on what BA players are trying to rebuild? I had a mild interest in them right before the 9th announcement so I'm curious to know why they seem to be kicking and screaming.

 Mixzremixzd wrote:
Can you be a bit more specific on what BA players are trying to rebuild? I had a mild interest in them right before the 9th announcement so I'm curious to know why they seem to be kicking and screaming.

It's Martel. To him, they're always kicking and screaming.

That said, my experience yesterday says to me that I think BA and other aggressive assault-oriented marine armies should be very happy in the upcoming edition.