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 Hellebore wrote:
The abstract progressive scoring IMO is not any superior to one off scoring at the end, especially if you're interested in simulating a war over playing an abstract game.

Well I can't help with your disconnect - but on this I'd disagree. Progressive scoring is good because it adds dimensionality to the game.

If everything is determined at the end, the only real measure of an army's ability is "does it kill good"?
Which I feel is one of the major issues of "older" 40k. Power was typically one-dimensional. How much damage can you do - preferably while not taking any (and the best way to not take any is for the opponent to be dead.) You can try to think this is complicated by arguing for "glass cannons" versus... idk, "tough, lower DPS armies". But I'm not sure that ever really worked out. Usually because you have to factor in movement tricks and other elements.

To which you might say that's still an issue today. But evidently its not entirely - otherwise as per the post above winning from an inferior position or being wiped would never come up.
Arguably this applied in the old editions with score at the end systems. I had various games of 7th come down to chucking 1 Jetbike down onto the last objective for instance.

I mean I can sort of understand the concern. Maybe this is strawmanning (or some other knock) on your position - but I remember playing 40k way back in day, in 2nd and early 3rd - and by and large we didn't care about missions. You just pushed your army up the table, shooting as you went, until stuff got stuck into combat. One army would fall over, and the winning player was obvious. And this seemed fun enough when we were +/- 14.
We played Fantasy in much the same way.

But the moment people start to... analyse the rules, this sort of becomes impossible. Its one of the reasons I found "rejoining" the game in 5th so hard. People didn't take armies of "the random crap they'd collected over half a decade". They took armies that were purely the best units in the given codex (with a skew towards the better codexes full stop). Maybe GW could balance things out so every unit functions the same - but I'm not sure that would be great. So instead there will be winners and losers - and the winners stomp the losers flat. This reaching the worst - but logical - conclusion in 7th edition.

Tyel wrote:
To which you might say that's still an issue today. But evidently its not entirely - otherwise as per the post above winning from an inferior position or being wiped would never come up.
Arguably this applied in the old editions with score at the end systems. I had various games of 7th come down to chucking 1 Jetbike down onto the last objective for instance.

As much as I enjoy how progressive scoring encourages you to care about the objectives before the very last turn, I've also had games where one player deploys enough sacrificial infiltrators to stall the entire army for a turn or two, and accumulate a lead that is impossible to recover from even when they get wiped. That's incredibly lame.

I agree with Hellebore that the real issues are deeper than whether you rack up points every turn or at the end of the game. Having 'objectives' that boil down to 'arbitrary points on the board you stand next to' is part of it; it's an uninteresting and exploitable objective structure under either system.

Tyel wrote:

 Hellebore wrote:
The abstract progressive scoring IMO is not any superior to one off scoring at the end, especially if you're interested in simulating a war over playing an abstract game.

Well I can't help with your disconnect - but on this I'd disagree. Progressive scoring is good because it adds dimensionality to the game.

If everything is determined at the end, the only real measure of an army's ability is "does it kill good"?
Which I feel is one of the major issues of "older" 40k. Power was typically one-dimensional. How much damage can you do - preferably while not taking any (and the best way to not take any is for the opponent to be dead.) You can try to think this is complicated by arguing for "glass cannons" versus... idk, "tough, lower DPS armies". But I'm not sure that ever really worked out. Usually because you have to factor in movement tricks and other elements.

To which you might say that's still an issue today. But evidently its not entirely - otherwise as per the post above winning from an inferior position or being wiped would never come up.
Arguably this applied in the old editions with score at the end systems. I had various games of 7th come down to chucking 1 Jetbike down onto the last objective for instance.

I mean I can sort of understand the concern. Maybe this is strawmanning (or some other knock) on your position - but I remember playing 40k way back in day, in 2nd and early 3rd - and by and large we didn't care about missions. You just pushed your army up the table, shooting as you went, until stuff got stuck into combat. One army would fall over, and the winning player was obvious. And this seemed fun enough when we were +/- 14.
We played Fantasy in much the same way.

But the moment people start to... analyse the rules, this sort of becomes impossible. Its one of the reasons I found "rejoining" the game in 5th so hard. People didn't take armies of "the random crap they'd collected over half a decade". They took armies that were purely the best units in the given codex (with a skew towards the better codexes full stop). Maybe GW could balance things out so every unit functions the same - but I'm not sure that would be great. So instead there will be winners and losers - and the winners stomp the losers flat. This reaching the worst - but logical - conclusion in 7th edition.

Being able to pin enemy units in place meant you didn't need to care about your lethality level, because stopping them acting was enough if you needed to beat them to the objective. Lethality is too blunt a tool to use and it results in games that are just alpha and counter alpha strikes. Modern 40k is still incredibly lethal.


As I said, I've no issue with the soundness of the mechanics or their maths, but how it relates to the game it represents. We're in such pure abstraction now with some 40k mechanics that you could just as straight faced put in a 'connect 4' victory point where you get points for having 4 units in a row. It might be mechanically sound but it has no real relationship to what the game is simulating.

I'm absolutely amazed GW have doggedly stuck to their terrible true line of sight rules given how willing they are to drop any pretence of simulation from other key parts of the game. Using abstract LoS IMO is actually an example of abstraction working WITH the simulation rather than against it, because it reflects the dynamic nature of the models and how they aren't all stuck in silly poses. They take cover and sneak. Victory point accumulation zones, really don't have much in the way of any connection to what's supposed to be happening.

There are also a range of ways you reflect the importance of objectives when you can't get points for standing on them. Random game lengths is one way to do that. It puts everyone on the offensive because you don't know how long you've got to take the objective before your window of operations closes, reducing the last turn dash because you don't know when the last turn will be.

Having a different relationship with the whole battlefield is another way. Every part of the battlefield is important in some way, maybe you score points everywhere and just more when you're on the strategically important spot. The more table dominance you finish with, the more ground you've managed to control, the more likely you can keep it while reinforcements come in to shore it up.


The current game boils down to pure kill ratios and standing on point circles. Unless you provide other options, the effectiveness of units will be measured on only those 2 metrics and the game will continue to reduce in its depth.