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yukishiro1 wrote:
Another way to deal with it besides lethality might be to require a clearer numerical advantage to hold objectives, and therefore generate more ties. It seems dubious both conceptually and from a gameplay point of view to have 9 guardsmen "holding" an objective against 8 cultists, or vice versa.

Like consider if you changed the holding rules to: (1) to hold an objective, you need to have double or more the amount of models as your opponent; (2) ob-sec counts double; and (3) you can never control an objective if your opponent has 5 or more models on it (with ob-sec counting double again), no matter how many you have. Probably put scoring back to the end of each player's turn, too, so that you can get control by having a good round of combat to clear them out, even if they'll come back next turn and do the same to you potentially.

I think that would produce a game where you could tone down the lethality, because the early game would be dominated by a lot of inconclusive scrums where neither player gets a clear advantage. So the strategy would then come down to how you commit your forces to each objective, because the winner is going to be the one who commits correctly and wears down the opponent enough over the course of the game to get control of enough objectives before the end of the game to win. Horde armies can deny points by just piling bodies on, but they aren't going to get any points by doing that either as long as the opponent also pushes bodies on, so the fact that you can't delete a whole army in 1-2 turns of shooting doesn't actually mean they win the game by default.

Warmachine handled this with the idea of contesting zones. Instead of having to do some calculus to figure out who has the point you only control it if your opponent has no models in the zone at all, and then the zones were bigger to make that harder to do. 40k could easily borrow that idea. I think you're absolutely right that the current rules for controlling an objective are bad, but I don't know that making them even more complicated is the right way to go.

There's a narrative aspect to "I control this objective if I have models on it and you don't" as well, in the real world an objective is an objective in the first place because there's something important there. Material or personnel that needs recovered, infrastructure that needs sabotaged, maybe it's just a good defensive position to put down suppressive fire so other elements of your task force can do what they need to do. You're generally not asking soldiers in the field to stand on a spot without a reason, and whatever that reason is they're not going to be focused on it if there are enemy soldiers near by. Edit: Although as has been pointed out sometimes that reason is "die horribly because we can replace you more easily than they can replace ammo".

Karol wrote:

 Canadian 5th wrote:

That's nonsense. Your pregame planning should always be heavily influenced by the enemy's forces. No sane commander is going to instruct his soldiers to focus on something that either doesn't exist in the enemy's force or which the enemy can easily make impossible by employing skill in their own actions.

You mean like operation Market Garden, because from what I understand, the british don't claim Montgomery to have been insane. Or stuff like rolling wave tactics the Soviets used durning 1920 or WWII. In 1943 the 1st divions of the Polish Communist Army was send without air support , by order of the soviet high command to attack a german forces around Lenino, without an artilery barrage or support from Soviet units in the same area. What followed was 50% loses in 2 days, and territory gains that were soon lost, because the units that went 17km deep in to german lines were in danger of being cut off. Durning WWI it was very common for ally forces to send in ANZAC or colony units to be bleed, sometimes just so the germans would use up ammo or to make breachs in mine fields. Durning fights around Galipoli the ally forces were attacking up steap hills, through mine fields and razorwire suffering gigantic loses and achiving nothing. Americans and French durning fights in Korea and Vietnam were doing mighty stupid things, sending troops not knowing what is around them, and losing a ton of them too.

Every example here was either a failure or an act of desperation. No commander would choose these as their primary options and neither should those of us who play 40k.

But that is litteraly what their did. China high command durning the vietnam war, advised the northern vietnam HQ to make them bleed vietcong troops and they did that. And they won't. Zhukov did the same and he won against the germans. When Kajdu fought the western alliance durning the battle of legnica he let the rus auxiliaries be slaughtered, and the mongols clearly won that battle, including killing the Henry the Bearded, killing the Teutonic knights kompturs present and a bunch of nobles and dukes. Israel Army often did the same to ethiopian descent soldiers, sending them in to place where they didn't want to send their regular units.
Armies, on the regular basis, drop troops in places when they get destroyed without having any real plans how to hold and control specific places. Practicaly every army, bar maybe persians and chinese, waged war in afganistan that way. No plan, no real objectives, years of slaughter, still claiming tactical victory.

Karol wrote:
But that is litteraly what their did. China high command durning the vietnam war, advised the northern vietnam HQ to make them bleed vietcong troops and they did that. And they won't. Zhukov did the same and he won against the germans. When Kajdu fought the western alliance durning the battle of legnica he let the rus auxiliaries be slaughtered, and the mongols clearly won that battle, including killing the Henry the Bearded, killing the Teutonic knights kompturs present and a bunch of nobles and dukes. Israel Army often did the same to ethiopian descent soldiers, sending them in to place where they didn't want to send their regular units.
Armies, on the regular basis, drop troops in places when they get destroyed without having any real plans how to hold and control specific places. Practicaly every army, bar maybe persians and chinese, waged war in afganistan that way. No plan, no real objectives, years of slaughter, still claiming tactical victory.

Karol your understanding of warfare is as poor as your grasp on 40k. If you follow these examples of 'success' in your games it's little wonder you win as rarely as you claim.

I'd prefer Secondary Objectives to be determined randomly.
High command has issued you orders. It doesn't matter if you like them, agree with them, understand why, or are even the most capable force to carry them out. Hell, sometimes the orders might even be based on faulty intel (in the case of drawing one that's actually impossible for you to achieve - say killing psykers when the opponent isn't fielding any).

I also prefer "secondaries" to be more random, including pre-game or within the game (e.g. using a deck of cards, say).

Allowing people to bake achieving/denying secondaries into the list-building both drains the game of variety and removes tactical depth from the game as players don't need to "think on the fly" in-game and occasionally play their army against its strengths to achieve victory, instead of front-loading the game (even more) to the list-building phase.

 Canadian 5th wrote:

Karol your understanding of warfare is as poor as your grasp on 40k. If you follow these examples of 'success' in your games it's little wonder you win as rarely as you claim.

Wait so your claim is that those forces I have listed were somehow not victorious? Because it is big claim to say that Zhukov did no win WWII or that north vietnam didn't win the vietnam war.

Plus IMO your claim that for the tactic to be considered valid in use, the force had to be both victorious and winning was a strech, because a ton of armies did it and lost , or were losing did it an won. And this is before stuff like goverments and high commands letting something happen just, so they can have a causus belli or seem to be the one being attacked.

ccs wrote:
I'd prefer Secondary Objectives to be determined randomly.
High command has issued you orders. It doesn't matter if you like them, agree with them, understand why, or are even the most capable force to carry them out. Hell, sometimes the orders might even be based on faulty intel (in the case of drawing one that's actually impossible for you to achieve - say killing psykers when the opponent isn't fielding any).

This just sounds like garbage game design.

 vipoid wrote:

ccs wrote:
I'd prefer Secondary Objectives to be determined randomly.
High command has issued you orders. It doesn't matter if you like them, agree with them, understand why, or are even the most capable force to carry them out. Hell, sometimes the orders might even be based on faulty intel (in the case of drawing one that's actually impossible for you to achieve - say killing psykers when the opponent isn't fielding any).

This just sounds like garbage game design.

(shrugs) I've played plenty of games {GW & otherwise} over the years where it's worked just fine.
And it certainly mirrors plenty of real world situations past/present/future.

I think introducing some element of randomness or at least not complete player control into the secondaries would be good. I think GW were edging towards a good system with the Maelstrom cards from the end of 8th edition where the deck was a heavily curated collection rather than being entirely random. Something that forces a bit more in-game thought and decision-making is what 40k needs. I like the idea of having your opponent choose 1-2 of the categories you need to select from but I think that would also need some tweaking to make it work.

That brings us back to the (war)game vs war(game) design conversation. GW provides Open War format (they've made Open War cards for 9th, right?) for people who want that randomness of war, and Matched Play for people looking for more controlled game-aspects.

Rihgu wrote:
That brings us back to the (war)game vs war(game) design conversation. GW provides Open War format (they've made Open War cards for 9th, right?) for people who want that randomness of war, and Matched Play for people looking for more controlled game-aspects.

I think there's a middle ground between the often ridiculous randomness of the Open War cards and the too-controlled set-up we have now. That seems to be what people are arguing for. It's a tough thing to get right because it requires a lot of testing and adjustments but I think games with less controllable win conditions and more in-game decisions that matter often play better. At the moment 40k feels a lot like you're playing the same game over and over because the Primary rarely changes and the Secondaries are often the same for any given army too.

I'm not sure randomness is needed, but something to shake up the extreme degree to which lists are engineered to just do one thing.

I think it basically all comes down to the fact that the current system, far from forcing you to build a balanced list, in fact encourages the opposite - building very specifically, because you have complete control over what your objectives are (aside from the mission-specific secondary, which tends to either be utter garbage or an auto-pick, and which you don't have to pick anyway).

That's why I like the idea of having the opponent choose one of the secondaries (obviously with the list reworked so that they aren't keyword-locked). It's not random, but it does mean you can't just engineer a list to within an inch of its life and not have to ever worry about having to do something different.

Another option is making the mission-specific secondary mandatory, but with how terrible GW is at balancing those, I fear that will just end up by total "coincidence" benefitting certain factions *cough cough* over others, just like the core secondary system does.

I like the idea of something like...

1. The mission secondary always applies to both players.
2. The player may pick one secondary for themselves.
3. The player selects either 3 or 6 other secondaries and rolls a d3 or d6 to determine which one they get.

I think that with such a system there should also be a core stratagem that allows a player to pick a second secondary for 2CP and pick all 3 for 3CP, or something like that.

 vipoid wrote:

ccs wrote:
I'd prefer Secondary Objectives to be determined randomly.
High command has issued you orders. It doesn't matter if you like them, agree with them, understand why, or are even the most capable force to carry them out. Hell, sometimes the orders might even be based on faulty intel (in the case of drawing one that's actually impossible for you to achieve - say killing psykers when the opponent isn't fielding any).

This just sounds like garbage game design.

Randomness isn't inherently bad game design. Honestly, I've gotten a little tired over the years of people insisting that it's bad design if they're not allowed to choose their exact forces, their exact objectives, and the exact scenario and board layout, so that they can run min-max netlists with no unexpected challenges. Not saying that's what you're asking for, but randomness that forces you to consider all possibilities isn't a bad thing.

Bad design (if perfect tournament balance is your goal, rather than unpredictability/realism a la AK47 Republic) would be not providing any recourse if the objective is impossible to achieve, locking the player out of any VP, and further rewarding armies that minimize giving up secondaries. You could instead have the player re-roll until they get an achievable objective, award an automatic flat number of VP, or weight the other objectives higher to compensate.

Or just have secondary objectives that aren't keyword locked...

Rihgu wrote:
That brings us back to the (war)game vs war(game) design conversation. GW provides Open War format (they've made Open War cards for 9th, right?) for people who want that randomness of war, and Matched Play for people looking for more controlled game-aspects.

Quite the opposite. Most people look to matched-play for a (broadly) competitive, tactically challenging/stimulating game-play experience, which is increasingly eroded through the introduction of the less-cerebral / tactically challenging, "de-randomised" and "controlled" ITC-inspired secondaries, seize-removal, etc. all of which give the game a far less "competitive", more mass-market friendly rock-paper-scissors vibe.

vipoid wrote:

ccs wrote:
I'd prefer Secondary Objectives to be determined randomly.
High command has issued you orders. It doesn't matter if you like them, agree with them, understand why, or are even the most capable force to carry them out. Hell, sometimes the orders might even be based on faulty intel (in the case of drawing one that's actually impossible for you to achieve - say killing psykers when the opponent isn't fielding any).

This just sounds like garbage game design.

Like how it currently works isn't garbage????

yukishiro1 wrote:Or just have secondary objectives that aren't keyword locked...

this would work

Sunny Side Up wrote:

Rihgu wrote:
That brings us back to the (war)game vs war(game) design conversation. GW provides Open War format (they've made Open War cards for 9th, right?) for people who want that randomness of war, and Matched Play for people looking for more controlled game-aspects.

Quite the opposite. Most people look to matched-play for a (broadly) competitive, tactically challenging/stimulating game-play experience, which is increasingly eroded through the introduction of the less-cerebral / tactically challenging, "de-randomised" and "controlled" ITC-inspired secondaries, seize-removal, etc. all of which give the game a far less "competitive", more mass-market friendly rock-paper-scissors vibe.

Open war deck is literally the best thing they've done in 40k.
But currently, players have faaaaarrrrrr too much control over the game. All of the aspects of the battle besides the lists should be 100% randomly drawn. The battlefield should be the 3rd belligerent in any skirmish.

The more "randomness" and potentially different needs the missions demand of the player, the more players will need to create a flexible and less skewed list. If you dont know what the objectives will be, you need to bring a last that can potentially handle all of them.

The problem right now is that the primary objectives are all basically variations of holding control points. The secondaries can all be chosen directly by the player for maximum point potential. There is basically no forced variation in the mission structure at all and players can thus perfectly account for optimizing their points at the army post stage. The game then because a game of who has the better optimized list (which has always been an issue but is getting worse)

 Mezmorki wrote:
The more "randomness" and potentially different needs the missions demand of the player, the more players will need to create a flexible and less skewed list. If you dont know what the objectives will be, you need to bring a last that can potentially handle all of them.

The problem right now is that the primary objectives are all basically variations of holding control points. The secondaries can all be chosen directly by the player for maximum point potential. There is basically no forced variation in the mission structure at all and players can thus perfectly account for optimizing their points at the army post stage. The game then because a game of who has the better optimized list (which has always been an issue but is getting worse)

Thanks to ITC donkey-caves, look at where is gotten us.

I was toying around with a design for a bunch of missions with attacker and defender setups (ie asymmetric objectives) and then having a system where players would bid command points for the right to choose whether they want to be the attacker or defender.

Approaches like the above allow for more mission variability while proving a self-balancing mechanism

Regarding secondaries, the more I think about it the more I think they should just go away.

I could see a return to something like 4th edition, where you have very different and diverse primary objectives which are worth VP's up to the total point value of the game. Then you are awarded straight points for what you kill completely. It always created a nice balance between attacking and working towards the objectives. I think the one thing I'd add into it would be some progressive scoring for the main objective so that players are encouraged to not turtle as much in the back line until the final l turns.

Sunny Side Up wrote:

Rihgu wrote:
That brings us back to the (war)game vs war(game) design conversation. GW provides Open War format (they've made Open War cards for 9th, right?) for people who want that randomness of war, and Matched Play for people looking for more controlled game-aspects.

Quite the opposite. Most people look to matched-play for a (broadly) competitive, tactically challenging/stimulating game-play experience, which is increasingly eroded through the introduction of the less-cerebral / tactically challenging, "de-randomised" and "controlled" ITC-inspired secondaries, seize-removal, etc. all of which give the game a far less "competitive", more mass-market friendly rock-paper-scissors vibe.

This is a bass-ackwards analysis of "competitive" games. Competitive gaming reduces variables to a minimum to increase the skill level needed to win a game. All this preplanning around secondaries is what competitive gamers do. They reduce the variables to maximize the chance of winning.

That is not to say that competitive gaming is the best way to game. Games are often more fun when the variables are high enough to keep players in the game rather than allowing someone to run away with the score. However, most competitive games are not designed that way. You don't get a handicap in football if your team has X more points scored than the opponent. You don't cap the number of points a baseball team can score to ensure a fun and exciting game for all involved.

Yeah, but 40k isn't a competitive game, its a vehicle for selling plastic miniatures. As long as selling plastic is the #1 driving factor, it never will be one.

 alextroy wrote:

Sunny Side Up wrote:

Rihgu wrote:
That brings us back to the (war)game vs war(game) design conversation. GW provides Open War format (they've made Open War cards for 9th, right?) for people who want that randomness of war, and Matched Play for people looking for more controlled game-aspects.

Quite the opposite. Most people look to matched-play for a (broadly) competitive, tactically challenging/stimulating game-play experience, which is increasingly eroded through the introduction of the less-cerebral / tactically challenging, "de-randomised" and "controlled" ITC-inspired secondaries, seize-removal, etc. all of which give the game a far less "competitive", more mass-market friendly rock-paper-scissors vibe.

This is a bass-ackwards analysis of "competitive" games. Competitive gaming reduces variables to a minimum to increase the skill level needed to win a game. All this preplanning around secondaries is what competitive gamers do. They reduce the variables to maximize the chance of winning.

Not necessarily. It's what competitive 40k gamers think you need to make a competitive game. That's fundamentally an issue with 40k, though. In-game decisions are so marginalised by the rules themselves there's really not many meaningful choices to make once your army hits the table. It is entirely possible to introduce randomness and still have a competitive game. The fact so many 40k gamers don't realise this speaks more to the quality of 40k as a competitive game than it does to the nature of mechanics with a certain amount of randomness.

Edit: ninja'd a bit!

I think sunny side up put "competitive" in quotes for a reason - which is that it is intended to provide a fairer and balanced setting for players to "casually" compete on a somewhat equal footing. The problem is that the serious WAAC min-max competitive types end up driving it past the point of being "casually competitive" and into this strange space where if you are running a "casually competitive" list you're going to get stomped frequently.

The result of minimizing uncertainty and variables is that it makes the game more deterministic. The problem is that since the factions or army lists aren't remotely balanced, the less randomness you have the more difficulty it is for the weaker list to ever defeat a stronger list. Imagine chess if one side had the usual setup and the other side had all queens instead of pawns. Practically no amount of player skill could overcome that.

This lower randomness (call it a more controlled environment) pushes more of the "strategy" onto list building and pre-game decisions. If there was a greater range of mission objectives and/or you couldn't directly decide the objectives to optimize your points potential, it would in incentivize more TAC type lists. If everyone is running more TAC type lists (less skew) then the sides are a little more symmetric in function and, paradoxically, more likely be skill dependent - assuming the goal is testing people's skill on the battlefield instead of testing their list building min-maxing abilities.

I also think the lack of a standard FOC really hurts the game both casually and competitively. It's too much to try and balance around. Titans and lords of war shouldn't be showing up in a typical match play (sorry! That's my opinion).

^^^That's a much more eloquent and comprehensive summary of what I was getting at!

The key takeaway, I think, is that 40k lacks the balance to be truly competitive while also having rules that exacerbate that lack of balance by not providing enough meaningful in-game decisions to act as skill differentiators on the board rather than at the list-building stage.

Themed objectives that reward fluffy play instead of of basic concept stuff thatbyoud do regardless of playing the game. Unless I am to wait for 10th edition to come out, "the next most bestest and greatest that ever was edition in the whole world" TM, I might as well start every game by forcibly shooting my shins off.

 catbarf wrote:

 vipoid wrote:

ccs wrote:
I'd prefer Secondary Objectives to be determined randomly.
High command has issued you orders. It doesn't matter if you like them, agree with them, understand why, or are even the most capable force to carry them out. Hell, sometimes the orders might even be based on faulty intel (in the case of drawing one that's actually impossible for you to achieve - say killing psykers when the opponent isn't fielding any).

This just sounds like garbage game design.

Randomness isn't inherently bad game design. Honestly, I've gotten a little tired over the years of people insisting that it's bad design if they're not allowed to choose their exact forces, their exact objectives, and the exact scenario and board layout, so that they can run min-max netlists with no unexpected challenges. Not saying that's what you're asking for, but randomness that forces you to consider all possibilities isn't a bad thing.

Bad design (if perfect tournament balance is your goal, rather than unpredictability/realism a la AK47 Republic) would be not providing any recourse if the objective is impossible to achieve, locking the player out of any VP, and further rewarding armies that minimize giving up secondaries. You could instead have the player re-roll until they get an achievable objective, award an automatic flat number of VP, or weight the other objectives higher to compensate.

(Emphasis mine.)

Isn't that exactly what was suggested?

Slipspace wrote:

Spoiler:

 alextroy wrote:

Sunny Side Up wrote:

Rihgu wrote:
That brings us back to the (war)game vs war(game) design conversation. GW provides Open War format (they've made Open War cards for 9th, right?) for people who want that randomness of war, and Matched Play for people looking for more controlled game-aspects.

Quite the opposite. Most people look to matched-play for a (broadly) competitive, tactically challenging/stimulating game-play experience, which is increasingly eroded through the introduction of the less-cerebral / tactically challenging, "de-randomised" and "controlled" ITC-inspired secondaries, seize-removal, etc. all of which give the game a far less "competitive", more mass-market friendly rock-paper-scissors vibe.

This is a bass-ackwards analysis of "competitive" games. Competitive gaming reduces variables to a minimum to increase the skill level needed to win a game. All this preplanning around secondaries is what competitive gamers do. They reduce the variables to maximize the chance of winning.

Not necessarily. It's what competitive 40k gamers think you need to make a competitive game. That's fundamentally an issue with 40k, though. In-game decisions are so marginalised by the rules themselves there's really not many meaningful choices to make once your army hits the table. It is entirely possible to introduce randomness and still have a competitive game. The fact so many 40k gamers don't realise this speaks more to the quality of 40k as a competitive game than it does to the nature of mechanics with a certain amount of randomness.

Competitive can mean two things. Either a competition between to opponents to test skill (aka sport) or a activity that intended to be fun for both players leading to an exciting conclusion (game). Randomness is the bane of the first and can be a good tool for the second.

So are you looking for sport or game 40K? Most competitive types seem to be in favor of more sport than game. They hate more randomness than absolutely necessary. Random victory conditions are not competitive because you cannot strategize them. That's why so many people hated Maelstrom Objectives. They were too random to allow for strategy. Sometimes you won or lost not by what you did on the table, but by the cards you or your opponent drew.

Maelstrom is a bad example of randomness supporting competitiveness IMHO - because it's affecting players disproportionately. One player can draw cards that just happen to align well with their specific board situation, while the opposite happens for the other player and it's gg.

Having variable objectives up front before deployment, and which both players are equally beholding to, is a much much different situation.

I think what some of us are arguing for this is:

More variability in the base types of missions that intrinsically come with a few ways to score points (eg primary objective plus mission specific secondaries), and ditch the secondary objectives entirely. More base mission variety should, ideally, incentivize brining more balanced non-skew lists, which would, in theory, reduce the power differentials between potential match ups and this make the game a bit more about table play and tactics rather than pre-game objective shenanigans.