Kill point missions always take some extra consideration- it's difficult to create a balanced mission while also creating an interesting theme or interaction for the mission.Despite a lot of opinions that get thrown around, playtesting has proven to me that kill points, for the most part, actually do work. The disadvantages MSU armies have tend to be more than made up for with their inherent advantages.
The real trick is trying to make a kill points mission that doesn't end up being a simply stand-and-shootfest, the kind that people play when they don't play missions at all. It's important to have some other kind of objective, as anything that brings the armies together to fight over something is good. At the same time, it is important to have a straight kill-points mission, because the duck and maneuver of pure annihilation play is a skill that should be valued and reflected in a 40k tournament.
So how do you make a kill points mission that's interesting but not crazy? With the secondary win conditions.
For the invitational mission, we went with table quarters secondary, and objectives tertiary. Quarters before objectives was for a simple reason: to often, players went for the tie and tried to make it an objective game. Because of the small KP gap, this wasn't too difficult to pull off. Because objectives feature so prominently in the tournament overall, I didn't like that it so often came down to objectives as a secondary. Quarters adds an extra layer between the two, and while it's still not too hard to tie on quarters, it's difficult to tie on both the primary and secondary as a game strategy.
The open mission is more free form, as the victory conditions are worth points instead of straight win/loss. It gets an objective secondary, because it's easier to visualize objectives while you play as opposed to quarters. It's just a bit easier while you vie for KPs.
It's Dawn of War because I wanted to have two Dawn of War missions, and KP is an easy scenario to work it in with. Having Dawn of War in a tournament is important, as it affects how people build their lists. Unfortunatly, it tends to also "chop off" a full game turn as people don't really do much more than move into their more regular pitched deployments on turn 1. That makes it less than ideal for an objective play where the objectives are placed far back, but reasonable for a lot of other scenario conditions.
Mission 6 goes up tomorrow, number 7 the day after that. Almost done! See you then!
