NagoyaHammer 2020 - May 9th - Planning the 40K Day.

[Primarch]

This is just a rough first draft for the 40K event, and please bear in mind my lack of knowledge regarding army building rules (I mean, to me a Battalion is somewhere between 500 and 1000 infantrymen, not half a dozen guys, a tank and a giant gribbly beast. ).

I think 1000 points works well enough for reasonably fast games of 40K. So I'm thinking of something along the following lines:
Players bring army lists at 500 points, and if possible, 1000 points. 500 points will be the default for games unless we have an odd number. Players will be randomly paired with other players before each game to create devastating tag teams of doom (maybe your opponents' doom, maybe your own).
Ideally each army will use one detachment for their 500 point list with two detachments available for a 1000 point list.
Players' special rules will NOT affect their partners, even if they share keywords. Likewise, players may not target partner's models with any abilities. Each player will have their own Warlord, but the Slay the Warlord bonus points will only count for the first Warlord slain per team.
Both players on a team will score victory points simultaneously, so won't be competing with their allies.

How does that lot sound?

[me_in_japan]

Many thanks for this, Prim

I think paired games is a good thing, but perhaps a player more experienced in 40k list building could advise as to how practical it is to expect most (all?) armies to fit a special-rule-obtaining list into 500pts. For context, I had an extremely hard time fitting a proper army into 1000pts last year, because there's a whole bunch of stuff in current 40k that requires certain rules be followed for army composition that you just can't reasonably fit into smaller armies. (Case in point: Dark eldar need 3 detachments to get special rules.)

On a side note, I'm aware of your opinion on building lists to take advantage of special rules, but in the current edition it is fully baked into the codexes. Building to get the army wide special rules is not cheese, or taking advantage of "free" upgrades. It's an expected necessity. Not doing it is deliberately gimping yourself, and while the points limitation would apply to all players, it unfairly penalises those armies that have more expensive basic units while allowing those with cheap slot-fillers to run fully functional armies. As a caveat to this, I'm very much an inexperienced 40k player in the current edition, and all of the above should be filtered through the understanding that I'll happily bow to the group opinion/opinion of someone better educated on the topic than I.

All the other rules stuff seems good to me, though

[Primarch]

I didn't realize Dark Eldar warriors were so expensive . Ok, so if 1000 points is too difficult for you, how many points do you suggest?

Edit - Doesn't every army just come with special rules? My Necrons did last year, without needing to be in any special formations.

Edit 2 - I've just been looking over Codex DE reviews on the web, so I may have missed something, but it looks like DE can easily take either a Kabal, a Wych Cult or a Coven in 500 points and access the special rules for all of the models in said Kabal/Cult/Coven. What they cannot do is take a Kabal and a Cult and a Coven and access ALL the rules from the book simultaneously.

This seems to be a peculiarity of the way Codex DE was written, but the idea that A) you cannot build an army at 500 points and B) that said army doesn't get any special rules is quite frankly not the case.

At 6 points for a Kabalite Warrior, DE have very competitively priced troops. Comparing them to the Necrons (I found my old roster) which have a minimum troops cost of 11 points per model (in a squad of 10 minimum), 30 points for the bare minimum squad is really cheap as a Troop-Tax to access the better toys in the army.

[Jye Nicolson]

Dark Eldar are a particularly difficult case; to my limited understanding they're more like three allied armies that you can't mix in a detachment or you'll lose your subfaction bonuses (and probably other things). This definitely caused issues in Kill Team when they ported the subfaction rules and most existing sane Drukhari teams didn't qualify for them.

500 points is a tight fit for a battallion though, if you want any non troop/HQ choices at all for Marines, for example, you need to go very cheap on HQ. And if you don't get a batallion you can't afford the stratagems the game assumes you have So you might end up with a lot of games where each side is six basic troop squads plus four HQ.

You could do something like say each player in the 500 point games must have one HQ and two basic troops, and starts with 6CP (so 12 total for the team), but I don't know enough about 40k to know if that's a good idea.

[job]

@ Primarch: I like the basic 500 point, tag team setup.

@ Jye: I totally agree that maybe a custom “classic” 1HQ/2 Troop Battalion formation would be good to allow everyone access to the full range of CPs. The likes of an IG army can quite easily fill out the standard rule book battalion and more while a SM army struggles to fill out the basic slots.

[Primarch]

What if, and bear with me here, this may sound a little nuts. What if instead of being able to super-charge your units, re-roll every vital save and using game changing rules, those were all some kind of limited resource. Instead of being able to do everything at will, if you had to think about the best timing to unleash your meagre handful of command points. Would that change the game at all? If the choice between a versatile list with a couple of CP or a more basic list with more CP was put in front of you, which would you choose? How and why would you do it?
What if the game hinged around leveraging your faction's unique abilities at the precise moment in time they would achieve the greatest result rather than just spamming them because you have enough CP to waste, wouldn't that be something?

Or not. I'm not playing, so if people think 1000 point lists with no holds barred is the way to go, I'll sign off on that.

[me_in_japan]

bleh, I had written a longer post, but upon reflection I don't want folks (ie Prim ) to misunderstand. I do get what you're saying, and tbh probably the easiest option is for me to just, y'know, not play Dark Eldar. Which is totally fine, btw - I used them last year so I should really get my stinkies or my crafties out and about for a bit. I'll go work on some lists for armies that don't have annoyingly fiddlesome composition rules, and we can save the discussion of the merits of CPs for the after-game beers


*edit* one small point to consider is that speaking personally I dont play half as much 40k as I'd like, and I'd quite like to put some of my fancier, perhaps more impressive units on the table. So perhaps a larger points per game might be helpful there?

I'm keen to hear what more experienced players think, but does having 500pts and 2 players each side seem necessary? Since we have 2 players, would a 1000pt per player (ie 2000per side) game take very much longer than a 1v1 1000pts-a-side game? We did 1000pts per player 1v1 last year and iirc it was ok. Or am I misremembering?

[The Other Dave]

Fundamentally, 40K is balanced around 1500 points or so, so the further you stray from that the more it will hurt some armies / advantage others. Basically, I think 500 points would be a rough fit for a lot of armies, not just Drukhari, and might be better set aside for a special skirmish-y event. Personally (and keep in mind I probably won’t be taking part, so I have no horse in the race beyond game design theory) I’d say bring 1000 points, and maybe schedule so the earlier games are asked to go a bit quicker and end the day with 2000-point team games if people are really invested of the idea of team games on the 40k tournament day.

[Primarch]

*edit* one small point to consider is that speaking personally I dont play half as much 40k as I'd like, and I'd quite like to put some of my fancier, perhaps more impressive units on the table. So perhaps a larger points per game might be helpful there?

You realise that if you had opened with that rather than your 'DE have a 1000 point minimum' waffle, I would probably have been far more sympathetic?

Fundamentally, 40K is balanced around 1500 points or so,

40k (or any game for that matter) is balanced by the players IMHO. There will always be better lists/armies and weaker ones. If the game were balanced, BoLS would run out of things to moan about.

Looking back over the previous events, all the way back to 2010 when we first started, a lot of games run over. Now, 8th has sped some things up a bit, but even so some games do take a long time to finish due to a variety of reasons. Some players bring hordes of minis that take time to move, or armies that require a load of different rolls every turn. Others just procrastinate or go wandering off to inspect other games. So, I am a little hesitant to just double points values and call it a day. I'd also like to keep things accessible for players who don't have every mini ever made for their army to draw upon. Finally, it's easier to organize games with a flexible number of people at each table.

So, how about the following compromise:
Players bring two lists for each game. One is a full list and one is a half list. If we have an odd number of players, or players simply cannot reach a certain number of points, we'll team them up.
Game 1:
10:00-12:00 (+30 mins for final turn) - 1000 points/2x 500 points.
Game 2:
13:30-16:00 (+30 mins for final turn) - 1500 points/2x 750 points.
Game 3:
17:00-20:00 (+30 mins for final turn) - 2000 points/2x 1000 points.

I can't guarantee that everyone will get to play with their full size lists every game, but unless people ask to be paired up, I'll try to make sure that everyone gets a chance to play solo at least once.

... team games on the 40k tournament day.

Not a tournament, a fun, casual event to meet friends and make new ones
If it were a tournament, I'd be going around telling everybody that I'm the reigning champ. ...

[Karantu]

If people aren't too against the idea of a doubles "tournament" I think it would be a pretty good opportunity meet to people and just hang out while playing some 40k. Although having 4 people at a table is also going to lead to more banter and therefore more distractions during the game.

In terms of a points limit, having an escalating points limit from 500 per player to 1000 per player would mean that everyone would have to bring at least 2000 points of stuff with lists for 500, 750, 1000, 1500, and 2000 points. Preparing 2000 points of fully painted miniatures with 5 lists might be a bit tough and off-putting to some people. Maybe just having a 750 points limit along with an option for some players who are able to bring 1500 points to bring both 750 and 1500 point lists. Depending on the number of players we might not even need anyone to play solo and having everyone play at least one solo game feels like its against the whole point of a doubles "tournament". Other than just winning games, having a best painted, best sportsmanship, and best army theme/concept awards that we could have everyone vote on, in addition to highest scoring might help make the "tournament" more casual.

Given that it's a relatively awkward points limit, everyone is going to have to make sacrifices and we probably will have to have some unusual restrictions to make sure the games aren't too unbalanced.

With that being said, we could do a poll and see how many people here are interested in trying out the doubles format this year.