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 jeff white wrote:
one mission will have much impassable terrain so tanks are less useful, one mission will have dense cover limiting effective range of weaponry thereby rewarding h2h type forces and units with short range weapons with lots of overwatch potential, one mission will have cloud cover and smog and other factors that may inhibit effectiveness of weapons that do not require line of sight, one mission might be mostly bare table thereby rewarding a gun line type force while exposing that army to dangers of infiltrators and charges from the side margins, etc...

So my Monolith is useless in mission A and useful in missions B and C, now if I play against someone who doesn't lose the use of any of their units in mission A I'm in trouble, but if I play against someone who does lose use of some of their units in mission A I still have a fine chance. More games will be over as soon as you see the matchup, something that is very negative. People are just going to find units that work in every mission, small Infantry or FLY units that can ignore terrain and quickly get across the table in the case there's not much to hide behind.

Did all the 40k defenders get together and decide to nitpick examples instead of arguing the actual point recently? You understand that in the rule suggested you just bring things INSTEAD of your monolith from ANYTHING you own right? People playing Malifaux don't just take models that ignore terrain for movement and the system works fine there. How can the match up be over before it starts if you write your lists AFTER the scenario and terrain has been decided and you have access to your whole collection of models?

It seems a contraction to say "we want to reduce the impact of listbuilding on winning a game of 40k" and then write up rules so how a list performs will vary dramatically according to the scenario. If people can re-write their lists after rolling the scenario up, you are essentially back where you are now - except people will have multiple pre-written lists based on whether they roll up scenario 1, 2 or 3 etc.

Priestley is right that this is a circle - but "toy soldiers as chess" seems to be what people want. We saw what happened with AoS when this was initially stripped away.

You could always compromise.

Chain of Command has a core TO&E (your platoon), but you don't choose support for it until you see the terrain and mission type/objectives.

You buy support with (you guessed it) points, which are determined by:
1) scenario (can be anywhere from d6 to 3d6 to a fixed number of support points. Most pickup game scenarios have 1 or 2d6)
2) attacker or defender (3 of the pickup game scenarios are attack/defend, the defender starts out owning the objective but the attacker gets double the support points)
3) platoon rating (core platoon TO&Es can be wildly unbalanced, so there is a platoon rating system. If a crappy platoon rated -7 goes up against an elite airborne platoon rated +8, then the crappy platoon gets 15 points of support plus whatever the scenario dictates).

There is a neat little mini game with supports to, as you keep secret the choices you have made until you place them on the table (except things like minefields or entrenchments or barbed wire; those are placed before the first phase begins).

But the point is that you have a core set of units you MUST work with, and then you can have supports to help you achieve your mission that can be selected once the scenario and mission and terrain are seen.

I like the ideas above about picking forces after the mission is selected and you know what army your opponent is playing.

Another way to do it is that you can have a larger force, say 3,000 points worth of units, with the restriction that players can only have say 1,500 points on the board at a time. The gameplay would shift towards probably having some core / fast attacking force at the initial deploy with then this bigger pool of units can draw from to accomplish the mission or counter your opponent.

I have heard very good things about xhain of command. I need to get a game of it.

Tyel wrote:
It seems a contraction to say "we want to reduce the impact of listbuilding on winning a game of 40k" and then write up rules so how a list performs will vary dramatically according to the scenario. If people can re-write their lists after rolling the scenario up, you are essentially back where you are now - except people will have multiple pre-written lists based on whether they roll up scenario 1, 2 or 3 etc.

Priestley is right that this is a circle - but "toy soldiers as chess" seems to be what people want. We saw what happened with AoS when this was initially stripped away.

The lists aren't re-written, they're just written. Also you're nitpicking the suggestion. Presumably players aren't aware of the scenario or variable mission objectives in advance so they have to write up lists on the fly.

Deadnight wrote:

 jeff white wrote:

 Sim-Life wrote:
Malifaux has you assemble your crew after you've drawn you objectives and set up the table etc. Someone mentioned Warcaster lets you bring in units from your collection as the game progresses.

Seems to me that this sort of process would end these sorts of problems, and would improve the game for both casual and for competitive players...
Thoughts?

I know we often disagree on stuff but warcaster NM has some very interesting features. I've said it in the pp boards but it does feel in some ways to have taken 15 years of lessons from wmh )of what was done right and what wasnt) and applied them to a new, smaller game since due to the size/bloat/inertia of wmh they can't easily be applied there...

There was also some of it in wmh where they had 2 or 3-list formats and an integral sideboard (20% of your lists total could be swapped out). For it to work in gw's space you'd need some changes though. Far less granular points costs and a massive reduction in internal-unit options at a start.

Yeah a friend and I tried workshopping the WMH multi-list competitive format into a 40k format years ago, but we found it to be unworkable for the reasons you indicated, amongst others.

Tyel wrote:
It seems a contraction to say "we want to reduce the impact of listbuilding on winning a game of 40k" and then write up rules so how a list performs will vary dramatically according to the scenario. If people can re-write their lists after rolling the scenario up, you are essentially back where you are now - except people will have multiple pre-written lists based on whether they roll up scenario 1, 2 or 3 etc.
Priestley is right that this is a circle - but "toy soldiers as chess" seems to be what people want. We saw what happened with AoS when this was initially stripped away.

This logic is backwards - if "toy soldiers as chess" is what we want, then there is not a lot of meaningful skill in min-maxing an optimized army list that you will pilot through a 3+ round tournament based on pre-set expectations of what you will encounter. There is a lot of meaningful skill in showing up to a game, looking at the mission, terrain layout, and opponent, and then figuring out what your best options for solving the problems posed by those elements are. In fact, it does reduce the impact of listbuilding, because as it currently stands much of the outcome of a game of 40k currently is dictated by the lists rather than what the players actually do on the table - most competitive lists rely on a skew (something that list does better than a hypothetical opponent) as a trade-off for a weakpoint that the list does not expect to encounter. When you show up to a tournament with 170+ wracks you're expecting to win on the basis that you are skewing your listbuild around the best troops choice in the game, a unit which is highly resilient to damage/very survivable/tough to kill in the current meta which tends to favor fewer higher strength/damage/ap at the expense of volume, while also having a very strong offensive capability that enables them to meaningfully fight and win against most units in the game. When you lose, its because your opponent brings a list that breaks the meta and can put down volumes of offensive output that you were not expecting to see and your list is not able to survive against. With post-table listbuilding however your ability to skew is severely hampered if not eliminated entirely, as your opponent can easily hard-counter your skew once they know what it is you are trying to do (provided they know what they are doing).

^^^^ I was something something along similar lines a while ago.

If the goal for competitive players is "toy soldiers as chess" then one would expect either (a) that it be straightforward to field a top-meta level list such that the power curves of the armies are as close as possible at the start of the game; and/or (b) that all units are similar in terms of their potential impact on the game, thereby diminishing the emphasis on list building.

The problem, again, is that even if we achieve the above (an argument could be made that we're close on (a)), we then face the issue of current 40K just not having a lot of space for meaningful tactical choices. The strategy-tactics layer is pretty darn thin in the current edition. Couple this with the plethora of die roll mitigation (modifiers, re-rolls, etc.) that reduce the chaos/uncertainty of the dice - and it's no surprise that the emphasis of the game is on list building and first turn advantage.

Sadly, to get "toy soldiers as chess" the game needs to have the one thing that chess has in ample supply: depth of tactical decision-making. This is about core rule changes that create tactical choices and tradeoffs beyond "drive straight at the objective and focus fire down the threats" - which is a fairly easy to optimize around (especially with the narrow mission design).

Moreover, if competitive players want "toy soldiers as chess" they should be advocating for more restrictions on list building and force organization - not less. They seem to be saying, "I want to make an whole chess army of Queens because I bought 16 queens and queens are the best!" instead of being willing to entertain a more controlled approach.

The main with issue with the multi-list/sideboard is that you will have to carry around a considerable amount of models to have options. For a 2k game, you will likely need from 3k to 4k worth of models, and that is going to be hell on personal logistics.

 Tyran wrote:
The only issue is that you will have to carry around a considerable amount of models to have options. For a 2k game, you will likely need from 3k to 4k worth of models, and that is going to be hell on personal logistics.

So? It's up to the individual how much they want to bring.

Tyel wrote:
It seems a contraction to say "we want to reduce the impact of listbuilding on winning a game of 40k" and then write up rules so how a list performs will vary dramatically according to the scenario. If people can re-write their lists after rolling the scenario up, you are essentially back where you are now - except people will have multiple pre-written lists based on whether they roll up scenario 1, 2 or 3 etc.

Priestley is right that this is a circle - but "toy soldiers as chess" seems to be what people want. We saw what happened with AoS when this was initially stripped away.

Right now you can play the game by going on the Internet, finding a powerful list, reading up on how to make it work (generally not that complicated), and then execute on the tabletop.

Any system where significant choices need to be made on the fly makes that harder. If the listbuilding/deployment system is designed around choice-and-counter, then you actually need to know the game and the units to decide what to bring, while taking the scenario, your opponent's units, and your existing units all into account. If all you have is a couple of pre-built lists, you're at a disadvantage.

I think where you're getting mixed up is the nature of the complaint about listbuilding. It's true that even with the proposed alternatives, what units you take is still vitally important, and the army selection mechanic would drive the game just as much as listbuilding currently drives it (which is a common complaint). But at least that would be decisions made at the table, not at home on a spreadsheet, with actual interaction with your opponent and the battlefield.

Plus, it'd also help with balance. Skew is less of an issue if you can adjust your forces to hard-counter it, and units with niches too specific to currently be useful in a take-all-comers list might see the light of day in a matchup or scenario that favors them. Balance becomes less about needing everything to perform to the same degree in a vacuum, and more about giving every unit a reason to be taken.

I'd really suggest looking into Chain of Command like Unit mentioned. The support mechanic there is a great way to balance out otherwise imbalanced (and fixed-composition) platoons, and it really does shift the game away from building an uber killer list.

Ok, since the thread took a more constructive turn, there is a room and reason for me to write one more post.

A lot of classic card games incorporate the mechanic of bidding. In terms of 40K this can take two forms. One is a Warcaster-esque simultaneous list building mentioned earlier, that I envision simply as building in chunks of pre-defined size after the scenario is set - first player chooses a chunk, then second player chooses two chunks, then first player chooses two chunks... and then the second player chooses his last chunk. There is equal number of question-answer pairs for each player, so that's fair.

But now a second bidding mechanics we actually use already in our spinoff - during the game, each player can choose to generate any number of side missions (via an action on an objective) out of a quite varied pool (with all achievable for any army we play with). But then, at the end of the game, any of the side missions that has not been achieved is penalised. This creates a very interesting gameplay, with a lot of very meaningful choices, as you have to generate side missions in order to win, but you have to try to predict exactly how the game will unfold. Then on top of that, when we play a campaign, VP difference dictates the bonus in the next encounter, so you must also weight a risk-reward nature of this bidding mechanic in the long term. This can be easily incorporated on the tournament level and with varied enough side mission pool works really well to reduce skew/promote varied army composition.

 Sim-Life wrote:

 Tyran wrote:
The only issue is that you will have to carry around a considerable amount of models to have options. For a 2k game, you will likely need from 3k to 4k worth of models, and that is going to be hell on personal logistics.

So? It's up to the individual how much they want to bring.

Sim, I am grateful that you took the time to read my suggestion and happy that you find some virtue in it. And, I follow you - in my professional life, I also find that people either do not or cannot read well and comprehend, or read and interpret in such a way as to force an argument where there isn't one (hunting straw men, 24/7/365 SOP style), or maybe just take some time to change their minds, but man, I reject a LOT of papers that simply get things wrong, when those things are clearly and explicitly given in source material, easily accessible with a bit of reflection. The world is an odd place...

Differently from some of the other suggestions, which are good I think especially the Chain of Command thing though I am not familiar with that game at all so I cannot be sure really, my suggestion above would not require any real change in the game rules besides structuring the process by way of which the game is enjoined. Same points, same missions really, all that plus open to spontaneous scenario building at table side. Yes, one would be limited by how many models one might bring and how many models one has in her or his collection, painted and again IDEALLY WYSIWYG, but other than that the game system would not have to change. The points would not have to change.

And yes, countering one poster above, in game A your Monolith might not be useful in a tourney setting, but in the next game it might, or would. "Deck" or list building would still be a thing, because everyone would see all the missions and table layouts prior to the tourney, and choose what they would feel might do best in each setting. Surprise, in such a case, one would not know beforehand which army one would be facing in a given setting, but... good!

As for the suggestion that then everyone would simply take units that fly and so on, well... maybe, sure, but different scenarios should include factors that affect flyers, such as dense cover or sandstorms at altitude or cloud cover or smoke or toxic atmosphere that wrecks turbines anywhere above 10 meters up or atmosphere that is too thin to allow flyers to function well or sky-dragons which are native to the planet and that only ever munch flying machines... anything, really. Actually, imho this whole fly thing is "for the birds" (as we may say in US English, not sure if this idiom translates well into other languages, pun intended). Hovercraft are great, but maybe in cities or heavily forested or other sorts of terrain, fast things should have to slow down or risk a wreck i.e. dangerous terrain for fast and flying vehicles, etc... besides all that, there should be force orgs and - ideally - such versatility of units should be costed in to their points in general. Where not, it would be up to house ruling to limit them or TOs to limit them or to constrain scenarios (sticking close to Priestley here) accordingly.

A generic sideboard mechanic seems interesting and easily accomplished. Compose a core army, share it with the opponent prior to match time. Compose also a side-board of reserves from which a limited number of points may be drawn, ideally VERY limited. Perhaps then roll for mission and set up terrain, then deploy and play as normal. I suppose that a reserves roll may be useful, in order to bring in sideboard units depending on different scenarios, perhaps with he option of entering from a chosen left or right flank table side or maybe deep striking or whatever seems appropriate.

Anyways, the idea with my original proposal was SPECIFICALLY to mitigate complaints about balance and points costs and skew lists and so much else. It just seems to me that by adopting a simple procedural structure, then most of these issues will melt away.

^^^^^^

I like the above.

What if (bear with me) an army had to have a certain % of its points in CORE units (say at least 1/3 of the points) and a max of 25% in HQ units. In a 2,000 point game you'd be limited to 500 pts max on HQ and must have at least 667 points in CORE units.

The rest of the point allowance that you have remaining can be spent entirely on side boarded units. There's no limit to what you can put in the sideboard, but when it all adds up you just need to be under 2,000 points.

For tournaments, you'd submit a list that's just your CORE + HQ choices. Everything else gets finalized when it comes time to setup a specific mission.

Obviously, this would require applying CORE across all codexes in a logical manner. But this could also be a way to handle FOCs - namely by just avoiding having to deal with them! Special army-specific stratagems or whatever could also influence what types of units fall into the CORE - so if you want to run white scars or whatever, you'd have more biker/fast attack units in CORE (but I'm assuming other units would then be removed from the CORE list).

Playing around with what's CORE or not, would let people take some different styled lists, but would still give them flexibility in the sideboard for support units.

I think the whole HQ must be x% and troops must be y% ECT ECT can work, but , it requires GW to do one thing they are moving away from.
That is, we need more wargear and unit options.

Gw has basically stripped our all war gear from most units because I'd it's not in the box no go, they need to redo this, look at HH, it's easy to add points to units because of all the stuff you can take. Because if you don't have options like that you will totally end up in a situation where no matter how hard someone tries they can not reach that requiered breaking point for % of troops with out taking another troop choice and then putting them way over the requirement

ccs wrote:
It's not the challenge I'm declining.
There's nothing out there list-wise that I can't beat or at least have a decent game against.
But life's too short to waste time playing with some of the assholez pushing models around. Doesn't matter if they're playing the top tier tourney list or a single grot.

You netlist and then complain that anything that can beat you is overpowered? If not, you're not who I'm talking about.

 Backspacehacker wrote:
I think the whole HQ must be x% and troops must be y% ECT ECT can work, but , it requires GW to do one thing they are moving away from.
That is, we need more wargear and unit options.

Gw has basically stripped our all war gear from most units because I'd it's not in the box no go, they need to redo this, look at HH, it's easy to add points to units because of all the stuff you can take. Because if you don't have options like that you will totally end up in a situation where no matter how hard someone tries they can not reach that requiered breaking point for % of troops with out taking another troop choice and then putting them way over the requirement

I guess that this goes without saying, but has been part of the discussion so far. Yeah, whatever would be done here with sideboards per Mezmorki's suggestion or Unit's or ... 9th is not the edition into which I would be investing my time. I suppose that others might, as all that is necessary is adopting a structured process, but the general idea is that I might be getting caught out with my WYSIWYG autarch with a jump generator on a table filled with difficult terrain such that if he were to use it then I should role a die with the chance that a 6 would wound him, else jump into areas that a likely fire lanes ... drama ensues...

 Backspacehacker wrote:
I think the whole HQ must be x% and troops must be y% ECT ECT can work, but , it requires GW to do one thing they are moving away from.
That is, we need more wargear and unit options.

Gw has basically stripped our all war gear from most units because I'd it's not in the box no go, they need to redo this, look at HH, it's easy to add points to units because of all the stuff you can take. Because if you don't have options like that you will totally end up in a situation where no matter how hard someone tries they can not reach that requiered breaking point for % of troops with out taking another troop choice and then putting them way over the requirement

There is also the issue that this system can give an advantage to armies with effective troops over armies where the troop options are a "tax". Now, that can itself be fixed so it isn't a system killing issue, but it does still need to be considered.

 vict0988 wrote:

 jeff white wrote:
one mission will have much impassable terrain so tanks are less useful, one mission will have dense cover limiting effective range of weaponry thereby rewarding h2h type forces and units with short range weapons with lots of overwatch potential, one mission will have cloud cover and smog and other factors that may inhibit effectiveness of weapons that do not require line of sight, one mission might be mostly bare table thereby rewarding a gun line type force while exposing that army to dangers of infiltrators and charges from the side margins, etc...

So my Monolith is useless in mission A and useful in missions B and C, now if I play against someone who doesn't lose the use of any of their units in mission A I'm in trouble, but if I play against someone who does lose use of some of their units in mission A I still have a fine chance. More games will be over as soon as you see the matchup, something that is very negative. People are just going to find units that work in every mission, small Infantry or FLY units that can ignore terrain and quickly get across the table in the case there's not much to hide behind.

GW has already designed multiple missions across AoS and 40k that work like that and they're universally regarded as the worst missions in their respective packets.

Thats always been the complaint against core / troops. The its not fair because not everyone's troops are garbage / "tax" and some are really good.

And thats true, but the problem is some army's do have a better troop structure than others, so there is really no winning there other than to make TROOP choices equally non optimal in such a system (from a competitive standpoint, from a narrative standpoint, those type of scenarios are fairly common)

 A Town Called Malus wrote:

 Backspacehacker wrote:
I think the whole HQ must be x% and troops must be y% ECT ECT can work, but , it requires GW to do one thing they are moving away from.
That is, we need more wargear and unit options.

Gw has basically stripped our all war gear from most units because I'd it's not in the box no go, they need to redo this, look at HH, it's easy to add points to units because of all the stuff you can take. Because if you don't have options like that you will totally end up in a situation where no matter how hard someone tries they can not reach that requiered breaking point for % of troops with out taking another troop choice and then putting them way over the requirement

There is also the issue that this system can give an advantage to armies with effective troops over armies where the troop options are a "tax". Now, that can itself be fixed so it isn't a system killing issue, but it does still need to be considered.

This is actually scratching the surface of the most serious problem with those types of systems.

Do they actually accomplish anything?

What exactly do you gain by forcing armies to be X% HQs, Y% troops? Is it making an army look more like how it would appear in the fluff? Unless you want troops to be 60% of armies and HQs to be less than 10%, I really doubt it accomplishes anything in that regard.

Does it make the game more balanced? Let's say we did go with that 10%, 60%,30% split. Is a Drukhari army made of 60% wracks and wytches any more balanced against an army of 60% battle sisters than current drukhari are against current SoB?

It absolutely is not.

With a very restrictive percentile system, you are reducing the overall power of armies in aggregate, but that's all you're doing. You aren't fixing balance issues, you aren't making the game more fun, you aren't even really making it faster to play. You're just leaving more models on the table at the end of most games. Woo.

Again, chain of command gets around this by giving poor-quality platoons (i.e. the thing you must take mandatorily) a lower rating relative to other platoons. Conversely, higher platoons have a higher rating.

The difference between force ratings factors into how much support you get. So, to translate that into 40k:

All armies must have X% troops. The following ratings apply (for examples):
BAD TROOPS -10
Sororitas, -7
Daemons 0
Space Marines 5
Space Wolves 7

(Don't read into the numbers, I just made them up).

The relationship between those ratings affects how big of a game the player Actually gets to play. So at 2k points, you must bring 500 pts of troops, 25%. But your force rating might be gak (Bad Troops vs Space Marines will be a difference of 15). This gives the Bad Troops player some number of additional points to spend on non-troops, e.g. 150 (if we just multiply by 10) or whatever.

 Mezmorki wrote:
^^^^^^

I like the above.

What if (bear with me) an army had to have a certain % of its points in CORE units (say at least 1/3 of the points) and a max of 25% in HQ units. In a 2,000 point game you'd be limited to 500 pts max on HQ and must have at least 667 points in CORE units.

The rest of the point allowance that you have remaining can be spent entirely on side boarded units. There's no limit to what you can put in the sideboard, but when it all adds up you just need to be under 2,000 points.

For tournaments, you'd submit a list that's just your CORE + HQ choices. Everything else gets finalized when it comes time to setup a specific mission.

Obviously, this would require applying CORE across all codexes in a logical manner. But this could also be a way to handle FOCs - namely by just avoiding having to deal with them! Special army-specific stratagems or whatever could also influence what types of units fall into the CORE - so if you want to run white scars or whatever, you'd have more biker/fast attack units in CORE (but I'm assuming other units would then be removed from the CORE list).

Playing around with what's CORE or not, would let people take some different styled lists, but would still give them flexibility in the sideboard for support units.

I think this would make Drukhari even more OP than they are right now.


Automatically Appended Next Post:

 Unit1126PLL wrote:
Again, chain of command gets around this by giving poor-quality platoons (i.e. the thing you must take mandatorily) a lower rating relative to other platoons. Conversely, higher platoons have a higher rating.

The difference between force ratings factors into how much support you get. So, to translate that into 40k:

All armies must have X% troops. The following ratings apply (for examples):
BAD TROOPS -10
Sororitas, -7
Daemons 0
Space Marines 5
Space Wolves 7

(Don't read into the numbers, I just made them up).

The relationship between those ratings affects how big of a game the player Actually gets to play. So at 2k points, you must bring 500 pts of troops, 25%. But your force rating might be gak (Bad Troops vs Space Marines will be a difference of 15). This gives the Bad Troops player some number of additional points to spend on non-troops, e.g. 150 (if we just multiply by 10) or whatever.

This just ends up back where we're at now with extra steps.

Not that I don't think that isn't an interesting system, it seems like it accomplishes the you guy's goal of having troops on the table without burdening the army that has to take them. It just has a very limited impact on interfactional balance.

Being forced to bring less of a bad troop than a good troop is still the troops being a tax, it's just a marginal tax rate compared to the games current fixed tax rate.

It doesn't do anything to make troops more worth taking and it has only a very small effect on the balance of the other 3/4ths of the army (i.e. an extra 150pts if your troops are bad), which is plenty of space to find more massive balance issues.

Also, elephant in the room, GW would still be the one making the numbers. We'd end up with Boyz at +5, Battle Sisters at +8, and Wracks at -25.

Here's the thing .... I said CORE not "Troops."

I was looking back 2nd edition codexes again, and remembering that the system used "Squads" which was basically all the multi-model units. Quite a bit fit within that.

So if the design were to utilize this must have X% CORE units, I'd imagine there'd be a pretty expansive increase in what falls into the CORE bucket.

 Mezmorki wrote:
Here's the thing .... I said CORE not "Troops."

I was looking back 2nd edition codexes again, and remembering that the system used "Squads" which was basically all the multi-model units. Quite a bit fit within that.

So if the design were to utilize this must have X% CORE units, I'd imagine there'd be a pretty expansive increase in what falls into the CORE bucket.

Aren't most armies already 90% core? Outside of Necrons they basically just gave core to anything vaguely humanoid. Not counting units that aren't actually sisters of battle (i.e. mortifiers, penitent engines, arcos) the only units that don't have CORE in that book already are the tanks and the Characters.

Pretty much the only reason CORE exists at all anymore is to nerf vehicles and stop characters from benefiting from their own reroll auras.

The point is that any of the ideas were discussing are of course going to require reworks to codexes. As I said earlier above - using this CORE idea would require applying some consistent logic to what's core and what isn't. It assumed that would mean changing what's currently designated core or not.

 catbarf wrote:
I'd really suggest looking into Chain of Command like Unit mentioned. The support mechanic there is a great way to balance out otherwise imbalanced (and fixed-composition) platoons, and it really does shift the game away from building an uber killer list.

From very brief reading - I guess Chain of Command works because both players are picking a Platoon, checking the two against each other and rolling up dice to work out support points - and then, armed with that knowledge, selecting support options?

Which I guess does require more knowledge of the game than purely netlisting - but presumably there would still be the issue that such and such a platoon is over/undervalued, as are X and Y as support options?

Or is it balanced on the quasi-Horus Heresy basis, that "guy with rifle" is basically the same regardless of whether they are British, German, Soviet etc? If heavy machine guns, mortars or light tanks are "efficient" that's fine, because everyone can go and grab one?

 jeff white wrote:

 Sim-Life wrote:
Malifaux has you assemble your crew after you've drawn you objectives and set up the table etc. Someone mentioned Warcaster lets you bring in units from your collection as the game progresses.

Seems to me that this sort of process would end these sorts of problems, and would improve the game for both casual and for competitive players...
Thoughts?

I feel that this is disconnected from both the tourney scene and the pickup scene. Part of the fun, for me at least, is making a decision on my list without all the information knowing that I have to live with that decision for either the one game (pickup) or a whole tourney. I can try to guess the types of lists that I will meet, the sorts of missions and the types of tables, but ultimately I live with my choice that I made before I knew the game. In my Flames of War days I could gamble on expecting to see certain table types (or not see certain types) or try to have a swiss-army-knife. Having to make the decision ahead of time was part of the fun for me, and I think for many others seeing as it is the most common format.

Admittedly, having the set missions takes some of the guess-work out, but you don't necessarily know if you will have all of them or what order they will be in. I've seen a Flames of War tourney try to have an element of support platoons that you could use in certain games after seeing the mission/table, but for most of us it didn't enhance our experience and it was not repeated. Make you list, buckle up your chin strap and live with your decision. I've done Escalation formats in 40K tourneys where you start with a 500 point list and add a set amount for each game but your lists are pre-submitted and you have to build on what you have.

There is also the practical aspect for pickup games. I plan and pack up the models that I intend to play with. Having said that, I do sometimes bring some spare models/other lists in the car in case my pickup opponent has a mirror force to mine or is perhaps looking for a different kind of game. Not everyone is in that boat. Additionally, list-tailoring is generally frowned on unless you are playing "Narrative" or a teaching game. This "see the mission/objectives" set up would lend itself to list tailoring.

So I guess I just don't see the problems that this solves for 40K? Kill Team had something like that with the roster etc. Different game/different gaming context and experience.

But, I am not a game designer, just a player. Like Oddball and his tanks, I don't know what makes them work, I just ride on them.

EviscerationPlague wrote:
Yeah, a system closer to how Tau/AdMech do it where you get a primary Trait and then a few secondary to choose from seems to work best.

If you haven't seen the new GSC it's actually kind of perfect for Guard. It's a pick 4 system. You get 4 custom doctrine points, with doctrines ranging from 1 - 4 points where you can mix and match until you hit 4.