Comp scores & Tournaments (uh-oh)

Well I’ve avoided this topic on this blog for some time now but I think I’ll step into the deep end...comp and tournaments. What has made me write about this? This post here by Stelek (who liked my comment! *swoon*). Now we should all by now know I’m entering Lords of Terra (fingers crossed; if you haven’t look UP...no no not your ceiling...scroll up >.<) which has a comp system and I’m blithely ignoring it (go me) having no idea what “comp” consists of for his tournament. Lords of Terra’s definition of comp is as follows:


“Composition is marked by a penal of judges, and is based on how powerful your army build was and how much fun it was to play against your army.”

Well that doesn’t tell me much. The armies I’m planning on taking are powerful because they are balanced and are fun to play against assuming you also have a balanced list because...wait for it...two good lists playing against each other is...fun. Is that allowed? Good lists and fun? So going off wargamersAU and what they are generally like...my lists won’t do well on comp because they have duplicity, my troops are for SCORING and I don’t use “bad” units... If things have changed since I last heard anything over there though, let me know and I might raise my head out of this desolate depression I am ever spiralling towards... So let’s really examine comp and good army lists.

What comp is “attempting” to do is balance 40k but what it’s really doing is changing 40k. GW has put out a gaming system we all enjoy and play and if you want to play in a competitive environment with their system & minis, guess what? You use their rules. No comp to “restrict” good lists. No 200 page INAT FAQs. No houserules. You. Use. Their. Game. I don’t care if GW comes out and says Imperial Guard have BS10 (that’s 2+ w/a re-roll everyone), I either deal with it or stop playing. Luckily for us, GW has not done anything that ignoramus (well...T5 Wolf Lords!?) particularly with their latest books. If you think the IG/BA/SW/SM/Tyranids books are imbalanced, go away. You simply don’t understand 40k. I can make multitudes of good lists from those above books + good lists from Eldar/Tau/DE/WH and they can all deal with each other. Some might win more often than others but they are not imbalanced (compared to Daemons/Orks/CSM/DH/Necrons they might be but that’s due to old rules not poor books). If you cannot see how this is good for the game or don’t know how to beat those armies, you don’t know how to play 40k and should not complain about imbalance but LEARN.

So let’s look at what the new books give you compared to old bad books like Daemons/Orks and old “good” books like Tau/Eldar. The new books have a ton of options available in EACH and EVERY FoC. There is no this unit is a mandatory unit because the others suck in their FoC slots. There is always an opportunity cost for taking something (look at BA/Tyranid/SW Elites) which gives the book a huge amount of flexibility and army OPTIONS (I’m not going to see 3 different armies at a non-comp tournament because just from those books I can make well over 3 varying army styles). This also allows an army to spread the offensive and defensive capabilities of your army throughout every single unit on the table. Compare this to the old “good” books. These books can produce 1, maybe 2 good list variants because they have only have a handful of good units and thus if they don’t take the advantages they get, they are terrible. These units are generally spread over FoC limitedly with most FoC’s getting one or two good choices. Eldar & Tau fall flat on their faces w/o Dragons or Crisis suits; whilst they make good armies their flexibility sucks. Now look at the old bad books. Orks/Daemons have few good options, have inherent inabilities to deal with certain army types (i.e. mech) and don’t have their ‘good’ units spread across FoC or only have one good unit (unlike Tau & Eldar who do have some competition, i.e. Falcons/Prisms & Broadsides/Hammerheads & Piranhas/Pathfinders). These books have even less flexibility and cannot build balanced lists. They are always at a disadvantage against some list type. Again, this is not imbalance, it’s poor rules transference from 4th ed books to 5th edition rules.

Now what book would you rather have? A boring uni-dimensional book (even if it does produce a good list) or a multivariate book? Multivariate thanks! Now that we’ve established GW is moving in the right direction for actual COMPOSITION of the army, let’s look at why I just capitalised composition. From Microsoft Words definition banks, composition means:

“the way in which something is made, especially in terms of its different parts”

Looking back on my Armies in 5th articles on composition here and here, we realise composition isn’t about how good or fun your list is, it’s about the individual pieces and how they work together. Afterall, the whole is greater than its sum of its parts, yes? Or a chain is only as strong as its weakest link? What does this have to do with fun? Nothing. What does this have to do with how good your list is? Everything. However, since in the 40k world good composition colloquially means handicapping yourself, having good composition should therefore negatively impact on your ability to win. Good on the non-competitive 40k community for getting composition back to front.

Now let’s look at this colloquial understanding of composition. It seems two-fold, generate a fun gaming environment and handicap “cheesey/OP” lists. Well, “cheesey/OP” lists are part of the game and are generally bad anyway (i.e. Lash, Nob Bikers, Tri-Mono) so we want to handicap already bad lists...go for it except comp generally doesn’t do that because it is far too arbitrary. Even with checklists you cannot take every single army into consideration and if you do, the checklist is going to be huge or have massive amounts of exceptions. If you don’t do that, well again it’s what YOU think 40k SHOULD be rather than what GW is TELLING you what 40k IS. Again, if you don’t like it, don’t buy or play their game or do it in your own backyard. Let's look at a quote from Stelek's post by whoever replied to the e-mail:

" I saw some of your comments on the Bolter Beach and I agree with you that GW is now creating an unbalanced game, and yes GW should repair it. But they won't, and the TO is FORCED to try to fix it, because it’s his A*&^ if he doesn’t. "

He's not playing 40k. He's playing what he wants 40k to be...and he claims this is required in every tournament? I'd love to see this in a painting comp. "All uses of NMM will be given -10 pts because NMM is awesome." Or in the NBA. "Usage of your All-Star(s) in more than 80 games will result in lose of home-court advantage in the play-offs and you are likely to be hated by all the fans." Seriously?

So what about the fun aspect? Ya I like versusing good lists like my own because then it’s balanced and if I get to rate comp, I’m rating crappy lists badly because of this 2nd arbitrary feature of composition. It’s boring to play against bad lists because it’s so easy to pick them apart but good lists score badly on comp because they are boring to play against...uh what? Close games are fun. Good lists provide close games generally all the time (assuming equal generalship & good dice). Even with skewed dice, good lists will do well because they have inherent redundancy. Bad lists, even versus other bad lists, will more often result in lopsided games as one bad turn can screw a list over or there are more scissors to its rock. Again, your personal opinion on what a fun army is impacts on my placement within a tournament which is supposed to be a competitive environment? Go away again thanks.

Now I understand this is a hobby and there is a huge hobby contingent that enjoys their storylines and fluffy armies, that’s fine, I do too. But as I’ve stated many times, don’t bring your style of lists to tournaments which have a RANKING SYSTEM and demand colloquial composition scores so you can win. It’s backwards. It’s based on an individual’s opinion. It’s not 40k, it’s what YOU want 40k to be. At the same time I think these type of players should be accounted for if they want to take their lists to a tournament but the top placements should be based purely on wins, not massacres or secondary objectives but wins. This means you need a system which either separates X amount of players for a “Finals” or enough games to have one undefeated player at the end with INITIAL match-ups generated by composition (i.e. split the field to good and bad lists). This promotes 40k as it is, a tactical game which requires though before and during the game and if you take a crappy list you have to beat good lists to get through, it works like that.

Even if you have too many players or not enough time for that type of system, comp should play no role in your tournament score. Sportsmanship should only play a role if you stay in the tournament or not. Painting is a separate competition (which doesn’t have a comp system? No way! Cheats! I want to win the painting comp even though I’m not a good a painter as the good painters). If it comes down to 3 players with 5 wins, well that’s up to the TO to decide but it shouldn’t be based on massacres over majors/minors or secondary objectives as the majority of time, secondary objectives play into the hands of some armies whilst not others and often Minor Victories are more impressive than Massacres (massacres generally represent getting a poor player either list wise or generalship or simply massively skewed dice...we reward this why?).

Nerdrage over. Seriously though, it’s annoying that people can get all high and mighty (see Stelek’s post) about how their opinions on 40k are correct (waits for some nitwit to point out the irony...). How about we use what GW gives us (hey! No more irony)? It’s their game and their system and if they want to drive us away with bad rules, they can. If their tournaments want to drive away competitive players with comp, they can. But don’t sit there and pretend you are right because of your comp system or that comp in anyway promotes a competitive environment. Since GW does produce a balanced game w/good rules but you think they aren’t, don’t force your opinion on others. Either live with it, talk to GW about it or stop playing their game.