spread the word 3 days till tournament 6 spots left

Here are the options for the ringer army:

Daemonhunters
Eldar
Wolves
SM
Daemons

Note: I'm not playing, just will have an extra army in case we need to fill a table.

Go with Daemonhunters!!!

-Mike

You just don't want people to see what a real eldar list looks like :-)

DH are the easiest to carry, so yeah, I'll bring them.

2 Crusader Raiders
10 GKT w/ 4 incinerators
3 squads of 5x IST with 2x melta in chimera with HF and Multilaser
1 INQ with Mystics, MM, Flamer, INcinerator in a Chimera with HF and Multilaser.

Sign up Thomas Jackson, Space Marines

I didn't say pushover :-).

it doesn't have a seer council, how could it possibly be competitive?

Hi

My name is Leigh Brady, I'll be bringing Chaos Space Marines to this Saturday's tournament.
Thanks

whooot another Chaos player....

this is looking good i love it hope you all do well while I'm winning the fantasy tournament over at the bunker muhaaa muhaaa muahaaaaaa

sorry guys take zack off he list he cant make it.

also take Pete Wallin off. He has to work.

Sorry I will not be able to make it today due to a family emergency.

Matt LeBaron - IG

So...how'd it go?

Dameon Green and his Chaos Space Marines won it all.
Nick Ditizio and his Space Wolves took second.

Also, I do not believe there were any ork players present.

-Mike

Rub it in Mike, rub it in.


Say, remember once upon a time when everyone said that Orks were the second coming of Cheese and everyone would play them? I'm glad we're back to the niche army that no one plays anymore. It's good to be back in 2004.

Everybody realized not being able to kill vehicles from range is suboptimal in 5th? IG made orcs obsolete with their massive templates to kill bikers and tanks to frustrate the walking mushrooms?

The breakdown of the field was good though. out of 18 players there were, 2 tau, two eldar, 2 chaos, 1 daemons, 2 Daemonhunters, 1 witchhunters, 2 space wolves, and then 3 each of guard and marines.

Yeah it's true. Orks are terrible
By 'everybody realized' you mean 'people complained on the internet and somehow it caught on'. Maybe I'm just obscenely lucky, but I have yet to ever truly have issues vs vehicles. Trukk squads have a range greater than a multi-melta with a much better chance of blowing vehicles up I have found.

Mike,
Can you post the tournament results and W/L/D records?

-Mike

That is exactly what I meant Tim.

Mike, I will when I get home.

There were 3 people that went 3-0 and so the winner ended up being determined by who got more special mission points (which isn't actually what I had wanted to have happen.)

I think one tweak to the system might be to have Objectives, Kill Points and Missions all count directly for battle points but have Objectives and Kill Points count for 2 points a piece and specials count for 1. The total points available stays the same at 75, but the intra-game scoring ends up mattering too, not just w/l result.

Thoughts?

hey Guys,

Thanks for such an awesome time on Saturday. I really enjoy tournaments and it's great to put a face to forum name here.

I would love to volunteer to help run the next one. Who do I need to talk to about starting a Spring Tourney? (March-ish)

The peice of feedback I can give is on the time. I think the time alloted for games was a little too long. 2 hours is plenty. Most tourney players are quick to set up and get going, especially when the game-structure (deployment, objectives, etc) don't change from round to round.

Again thanks for the award too. Having a plaque like that is awesome! Also love the gift card- I got me some termies with that...

Peacey-weace.

(very belated) thoughts on YTTH Stelek-style tournament scoring & mission set-ups. I had a ton of fun at this tournament, and the opposition and players were great. I was very intrigued when I first read about Stelek's concept, and very interested to try it out in practice.

That said:

(1) The objectives shouldn't be static. When they're always in the same five positions, the missions become very repetitive. Some options would be to have one of the five fixed, and each player place two others (total five), with no objective within 1' of another or a board edge, etc. Alternatively, start with all five fixed, and each player can choose to move any one (not, or alternatively totally, including the one your opponent just moved).

(2) The terrain was extremely sparse. Every table I played on was a Tau wet dream: cover in deployment zones and a virtually empty killing field between each deployment zone. I'm not really complaining, as it also was tons of fun for my Immolators, as there was literally no difficult terrain blocking up maneuvering on the tabletop. So shoot, *I* had a ton of fun with it. But in the interest of fairness, as well as what the game calls for, more terrain is probably necessary.

(3) Static terrain misses out on a big part of the game -- competitive terrain placement. Players should be allowed to set up terrain as well. This would then help account for the extra time that was built into the tournament.

(4) Deployment was too static. I think either a totally random selection (per game), or per round (rolled by organizer), or some sort of strategery built into the deployment roll-off would all be good. If the last, something like, for example: winner of the roll-off can choose to deploy and move first OR can choose the type of deployment (of the basic 3 in the rulebook). The loser of the roll-off gets to do what the winner did not.

Tricksy!!!!

(5) I think if you're using YTTH scoring, whether you double certain scores or not, then in the end you should be totally jettisoning W/L records and matching people by total score each round. So long as you have a certain critical mass (12+ players, I think), then statistically the extra points from fun special missions points won't significantly affect match-ups, so they may as well be included.

(6) There needs to be a mechanism for giving players full objective points (or some portion thereof), as well as kill points, for completely tabling opponents. Otherwise there's too much counter-incentive for players who are losing to concede or otherwise jimmy the works through shenanigans, by ending the game early (for example) and preventing someone from getting the objective points they logically earn had the game gone its full length, etc.

(7) On a related note, I don't know if the YTTH system has a way to handle games that don't go the full 5 turns. I guess I can't think of a systematic incentive for a deliberate slow-player not to be a d!ck, but if there is one, it might be necessary. Maybe I'm worrying too much about poor sportsmanship? I dunno....

(8 ) In the same vein, there's still room for 'soft scores' in a tournament like this. Given that points spreads can be considerable with this system (and that this is deliberate), 'soft scores' can be very modest and still have a net benefit without being overwhelming or totally deciding. In other words, a +1 point for painting (or a +1 over half painted, +1 add'tl for full paint-job), and a +1 point for player's choice (for any reason at all: painting, sportsmanship, composition, Coolness Factor, etc) can all be bonus soft-scores. If you limit "player's choice" to only the opponents each player actually faced, that would give people a potential of up to +5 soft points, and further incentive not to be a d!ck, etc.

If you don't want to include those soft scores directly in the overall score (your philosophy can vary on this), they could still be used for tie-breakers

(9) Finally, a philosophical note about the YTTH tourney-system: it basically takes the bias found in many tournaments (heavy emphasis on Kill Points) and totally turns it on its head: radically DE-emphasizing Kill Points. The Kill-Points missions are the main structural reason why 40K doesn't turn into a MSU game -- which is exactly the sort of philosophy promoted by Stelek, and encouraged by the YTTH tourney-system.

This isn't a criticism per se, but the fact that this kind of tourney heavily favors maneuver and MSU strategies should probably be overtly and very clearly pointed out in the information packet -- otherwise you're liable to get a few n00bs wandering in with more elite, 'traditional' 40K lists, and having a very, very bad day.

Ken, thank you for your thoughtful response, there's a lot of good stuff here that I'll adjust for and anticipate for the next iteration of this, particularly as relates to objective placement and terrain.

I'd be interested in what other people thought about the density or paucity of terrain, did people feel generally that it was too sparse?

I didn't really identify the MSU aspect of it as a philosophy, but you're clearly correct. Stelek would say that if you can't see that in the tournament design you deserve to lose, but I don't agree, and see how a little statement of intent at the beginning might help. As it was I didn't think we had too many (if any) real inexperienced players, certainly not like bunker tournaments.

Question for the group:

If there was a regular, say bi-monthly, 40k tournament where your performance carried over from tournament to tournament and there was seeding and ranking, would that be something of interest? I'm not necessarily suggesting each tournament would be identical, but they wouldn't be too different probably.

Thoughts?

I love tournaments! and would love to see them more often. I love playing different armies, I love the competition, the unique scenarios, etc.

I would agree that the terrain was way too sparce. It was almost non-existant on some of the tables. If it's a question of a terrain shortage, I have tons of terrain that I would not mind bringing to the tournaments.

One thing I would clarify, if you're going to use the same system again is whether you have to tell your opponent which units you've picked as kill points or not. I had two games where we shared what we had picked before hand and one where my opponent wouldn't tell me what he had chosen. I just think it should be clarified.

The scenarios were fine and I liked how they didn't change from game to game. And I think that the emphasis was more on kill points than objectives. I won two games out of three with kill points alone.

@ ThatTauGuy, Sorry I didn't share, I didn't want to know what you picked either, thought it would be more fun if we didn't know. As for Killpoints over objectives... I agree, maybe next time objectives count as x2 points per, and kill points x1?

@ The Fabulous Orcboy, I agree with the terrain being a bit sparce. I think they tried to make balanced table which was very fun (almost every table seemed symertical) but it was hard to find cover crossing the board. I also think that some additional missions would be nice. For a first tourney I think they did a amazing job, keep the missions simple did help avoid confusion. The following points...

6) alot of dicussion over this occured. I think they went with the system they did to encourage tactical play and avoid a table rush. I infact had to string out a game to make sure I had enough objectives and it made it more fun for me (not sure about the other guy) as I really had to think carefully about placement and deployment. I personally enjoyed the fact that tabling someone didn't give a auto max win...

7) If you get a really slow player (a friend of mine call's them "Slowhammers") Call over a judge. I have seen in smaller tourneys players get censered (sp?) for going slow on purpose. Did anyone have that problem @ this tourney?

(in reverse order from Dameon's post)

Quote:

Did anyone have that problem @ this tourney?

I'd also like to know this, since I was running it, but didn't notice it happening. I did notice that the players were able to talk out their issues with other players well (over measuring or whatever) and I was pleased to see that.

I didn't keep track, but by my count out of 27 games there were only 3-4 total tabling, So maybe it's not such a huge deal.

I thought the pamphlet made clear that you were supposed to tell the other player your choices, in any event it was what I intended, though I can see the other way has some value too.

One thought I had was to eliminate W/L points and do Objectives worth 2 points, Kills worth 2 and special missions worth 1. You'd still seed winner vs winners in round 2 and total points in round 3. There really isn't a good way to do 3 rounds with more than 8 players if you don't have pre-seeded rankings, and for 16 players you'd need 4 rounds (which might be possible given that there was slack time in the tournament already.)

Excelent tournament. I had several good games against some really classy players. I do like the 5x5 scenerio, it's about as good as your going to get for a tourney scenerio. Although it can be boring to play 3 grames with the same scenerio it does help ensure a level playing field so everyone has a chance. Some of the boards could definaly use more terrain, almost nothing blocked LoS and what we did have barely provided cover. One of the things that kind of bugged me was that I got really unluckly with my special missions and was only able to get a couple per game mostly because my opponents didn't run enough of the right type of units (i.e. destroy X vehicles when I'm fighting a Nob biker list). The winners were the ones who were able to max out both objective/KP, but also got lucky with the special missions and maxed those out too.

I would suggest changing the scoring a little bit. The two points for objectives and kill points was fine, so I wouldn't make any real changes to that. I would also give 2 points for a win, and 1 point for a draw(Win/Loss is determined by how many objectives and kill points you have). I like the special missions, but would limit that to three points a game. I would also change the way you handle special missions and instead give people a sheet with 15 special missions. You can accomplish any special mission you want each game, but can only acomplish one special mission for the entire tourney. So for example, if you can explode 4 vehicles vs. your first opponents you can claim that special mission, but if you later come out against a mech heavy guard army you can't do the same special mission again. You have to keep the sheet of paper with you, and you opponent has to sign off on it so it the TO can ensure you don't claim the same one twice.

Anyways, my two cents.

You know it would probably be better if I posted my suggestions under the right tourney.

Good thoughts, Somebody gave the same advice about a sheet of objectives at the event, but I don't know if it was you, if not, then that's two votes for that method.

I thought it was run smoothly I did not hear anyone complain about anything the whole time. I didn't talk to everyone there after every battle but to me it seemed like everyone really liked the way things worked out. I don't like when there are special missions that affect some armies poorly while others benifit from it doing things the way they were was cool,

And I did not find it boring to repeat the missions because playing someone new every time is always a different battle and really has its own missions in it anyways