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Tuesday, September 4, 2012

NOVA Attendees - How'd you find the missions?

Posted by Unknown
So with 6th being new and all and the BYB missions generally not the best for tournament play without some changes, how did the NOVA attendees find the missions? What were the good parts and the bad parts and how did they feel different from 5th edition missions? Did they take the 6th ed constructs and make them relevant within the missions?

Hit us with some opinions and feedback as I'm sure the NOVA guys would like to know and it would help us here with our mission designing for tournaments like Feast of Blades and 3++con (the important one, yo!).

The more information you can give us - the better, so don't hold back. Talk about deployments (Vanguard & modified Hammer & Anvil in particularly please), the tiers in 6th, the 6th secondaries as Victory Point extras, Relic, etc.
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MikhailLenin's avatar

MikhailLenin · 656 weeks ago

I thought all the missions were quite good but without the inclusion of mysterious objectives that made flyer list almost near impossible to deal with unless you took a large model count army that could withstand all the turns of unsuppressed fire.

The Objective portion of the Missions that is table quarters needs to be relooked because armies that included mech elements forgo having any vp for quarters which furthered imbalanced the games towards infantry armies. The vehicles penalties were already extreme in 6th and then not having them count for most missions was rough. One of the major reason Tony did so well is he had 2,000points that counted for quarters while most players had between 1,000 to 1,750 that counted. Btw this is not a criticism this is just fact.

Also not enough time per round for 2k, I only had one game go to turn 6.

I have more thoughts on the matter but overall i think the mission scenarios were fine.
5 replies · active 656 weeks ago
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James's avatar

James · 656 weeks ago

Relying on a skyfire nexus, does not good AA make.

I definitely called the scoring troops thing - survivable scoring troops are more important than ever!
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Sephyr's avatar

Sephyr · 656 weeks ago

Some armies don't really have much AA choice, so aggressively uncovering objectives to find a nexus can be a sound strategy. Far from optimal and i doubt anyone builds their list around it, but it's a factor.
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Genevaman's avatar

Genevaman · 656 weeks ago

True. As a Tyranid player a Skyfire Nexus can be a god send even for some basic suppressing fire. There's only so much Carnifexes with Devourers can do on their own and a couple Tervigon spawned Gaunt squads scouting out objectives isn't the worst way to try and push for another edge against a flyer heavy army.
It's not a sure bet and it's certainly not something to rely on but its an option when things are looking a little hairy and a much appreciated one at that.
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WestRider's avatar

WestRider · 656 weeks ago

Remember that only Scoring Units can benefit from that SkyFire Nexus, and only one at a time. Unless you're playing Big Guns Never Tire, I see pretty much no use in them for Nids.
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Azrell's avatar

Azrell · 656 weeks ago

you called what? table quarters could be claimed by any denial unit as well as scoring... so having survivable scoring troops is meaningless when when TH/SS termies can just claim the quarter for you.
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Azrell's avatar

Azrell · 656 weeks ago

Over all the missions, i thought were well balanced. that said it might be time to retire table quarters, or at lest make it less than half the mission objective in the open GT. Also why are we still using the old victory pts for things, kill pts are easy to use during play and don't require a calculator, if your going to use table quarters use the old kill points (now victory pts).

6th edition book missions are all about objectives, relic, mysterious, various pts values, etc.., So the vast majority of players are going to be playing games with those as missions. Its nice to have something a little different but allot of payers don't have the time to go out of there way to practice non standard missions like table quarters that require a different army build to be effective. ie death company can claim table quarters but not objectives... just seems wrong.

To be fair they played well and were easy to understand. So they are very well done just had elements that are over used and possibly imbalanced for 6th ed.
7 replies · active 656 weeks ago
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Azrell's avatar

Azrell · 656 weeks ago

I didn't really understand why the hammer and anvil was modified. But i thought that the use of "mysterious" objectives but basically pre rolled and universal for all games was well done, and a good compromise to get some of the interesting elements into the game without the randomness that tournament players hate. Warlord traits are still a random mess no matter how many table you can use at once, and seem to be ether totally useless or game breaking.
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Atrotos's avatar

Atrotos · 656 weeks ago

I believe Warlord traits will be codex-specific from here on out. The Chaos dex is rumored to have its own table. That way the randomness will be mitigated… 10 years from now when every codex is updated.

FW is actually updating characters with pre-determined Warlord traits - perhaps they know something we don't?
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abusepuppy 121p · 656 weeks ago

I would hardly be surprised to see the named characters in new codices get "fixed" warlord traits to reflect their personal styles, which isn't really a bad thing. Codex-specific tables could also be interesting, but such things can be very hit or miss, just as the basic warlord tables are.
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whitestar333 61p · 656 weeks ago

I still think that choosing Warlord traits isn't broken - as long as you play on tables that have balanced terrain elements.
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Threadmiser 79p · 656 weeks ago

I would love to be able to outright buy a warlord trait and include it in my army list. A lot of the traits are pretty useless for some armies. My necrons are meh on most since my lords tend to fly around on AOL discs of doom. Not sure how counter-attack would work with a CCB but outflank is pretty nice.
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Threadmiser 79p · 656 weeks ago

As a side note: what does counter-attack do for a lord in a CCB?
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whitestar333 61p · 656 weeks ago

Good point about table quarters. I never really liked the idea that covering the most space on a table somehow led to victory.
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lethlis 41p · 656 weeks ago

Yes I think that at least for the table quarters the vehicle points should have counted as well as the special heavy/fast should have counted for objectives. I found during playtesting prep that I was losing more often to vehicles not counting more than anything else(one game had 500 points of vehicles in a quarter and a 70 point kroot unit took it). So i eliminated most vehicles to help make it up but the fewer vehicles you had the larger your advantage.

Although this is minor one thing I was noticing was that with the height of the center pieces and that they were only open on 1-2 sides you could effectively box someone out for at least 1-2 turns from the central objective just by placing your guys on the inside of the wall. Also it gave a strong advantage to one side over the other.
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lords2001's avatar

lords2001 · 656 weeks ago

Vehicles not scoring when 7 out of 8 missions required it nerfed them hard. Plus flyer wings ate standard mech forces anyway - normal bs vs 6's to hit is just bad news.

Any army which requires mech to reach and hold objectives due to their regular infantry being weak - tau, eldar, dark eldar etc got hammered.
To be honest, foot gks, space wolves and even chaos to a lesser extent look strong - an ability to shoot hard, protection from and benefits from psykers (at least for the first 2) and an ability to fight in combat with almost all units. Daemons new stuff as out too late for most people to take advantage but they looked alright too.

Finally, table quarters meant a lot of armies held back and then pushed infantry into enemy quarters late in the game. If you do this with 600 points into 2 enem held quarters you usually won.

Good fun all round though
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MVB · 656 weeks ago

It bears a lot of analysis, Quarters.

If the vehicles you invest in can't trim away your opponent's equivalent points in scoring/denial, and if they can't reliably get your troops where they need to be, I think you'll find they are the suckage in 6th Edition with or without quarters.

The game as a whole HAMMERED vehicles, unless they are very effective gun platforms, combat platforms, or cheap (or 2 of the 3, ideally). Psybacks were still fine, b/c they didn't absorb huge quantities of an opponent's force. People who took air forces had what happened to them be predictable - they can't win games at 40k reliably, even with book missions, against peers, so much as they can do a lot of damage for the couple of chances they get.

A lot of people brought 5th Edition armies, even 5th Edition armies under the new rules (9 necron flyers with MSU troops aboard = 5th Edition army). Trying to find missions that re-enable the old game doesn't sound like a good solution, so for the moment at least I'm not seeing a huge negative to quarters.

We've got a year of analysis to perform to make sure we get it perfect for 2013.
2 replies · active 656 weeks ago
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MikhailLenin's avatar

MikhailLenin · 656 weeks ago

"If the vehicles you invest in can't trim away your opponent's equivalent points in scoring/denial, and if they can't reliably get your troops where they need to be, I think you'll find they are the suckage in 6th Edition with or without quarters."

I totally approve of this but with reserve mechanic and some of the terrain, it was pretty easy from individuals to avoid any kind of fire from vehicles by just hugging the hill terrain. Which goes back to the preliminary statement of yours, the Mech Player needed to adjust for that. I am not disparaging that fact, I brought a mostly Foot List because 6th edition made it too much of a penalty to bring Transports imo and I think it was a major reason I did so well but it doesn't mean that I feel it is fair or beneficial to the game to give certain army archtype a handicap over others. Mech or Foot both have extremely good appeals in their own and one does not necessarily mean it will crush the other but I did find that in the Contest of Quarters that if you brought Mech you were unlikely to win that one. Since the vast majority of games ended on Turn 5 from running out of time from what I understood talking to a few guys it also meant that Mech Armies only had effectively 2 to 3 turns of firing at any Infantry units that came off reserve and sometimes only 1 turn.

Overall, I don't think this was necessarily a bad thing, I am more concerned about pushing the game too much into 1 spectrum of lists and that is Foot Lists. At the moment I think GW did a good job gearing the game towards a Hybrid Foot w/ Mech Elements but dropped the balls on Flyers.
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abusepuppy 121p · 656 weeks ago

I'd have to agree- mech/foot/hybrid seems a lot more balanced in 6E overall, but table quarters push things heavily away from taking... basically any tanks, which is just unbalancing the game a different direction.

There's probably also some personal bias in there, since I absolutely loathe adding up Victory Points at the end of a game (it's tedious, error-prone and needlessly complicated), but I think the point stands.
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Gramps's avatar

Gramps · 656 weeks ago

Overall I thought the missions and deployments were fine. Certainly, vehicles of all kinds took a hit, but we all knew the mission rules ahead of time, so no complaints there. One thing that needs to be considered when dealing with table quarters, is what other mission would you replace it with? I think table quarters is still a viable mission, but perhaps it could use some tweaking. Allowing non-flying vehicles to score for quarters only would bring a bit of the balance back. Additionally, perhaps modifying the table "quarters" with a center-field non-mans land would keep people from just sitting in the middle of the table all game (not my idea, heard other TOs discussing it).

I thought the deployments were fine as well. Vanguard is not much different than a table quarters deployment used to be. Modified H&A was fine as well.

After the 14 games that I played (yay Ironman), I can honestly say I played primary objective missions and primary quarters missions in basically the same way. When you do not have to worry about vehicles, the missions end up being very similar.
1 reply · active 656 weeks ago
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Azrell's avatar

Azrell · 656 weeks ago

The big difference between quarters and objectives is that you can hold a quarter with any model on foot, you cant do that with objectives. That gives a big reason to take heavy hitting elite units rather than often weaker troop units that are needed for objectives. all considered i dont think we should be using missions 1/2 games where troops are not your scoring units.
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morgendonner's avatar

morgendonner · 656 weeks ago

While I understand the push away from kill points to reflect the book missions, I would like to see where in the book there's a mission for table quarters. Table quarters can be fun, but I don't agree with kill points being so trivialized while quarters becomes about 50% of games.

I don't understand why in scouring / big guns never tire FA/HS units become scoring for quarters only and not objectives. This changes almost nothing, and basically just makes swarms or vehicles count for quarters where they normally don't. I think for missions with these bonus rules, such units should count for objectives too.

Hammer and anvil also I think needs to get a long look at. It can lead to some ridiculous matchups. I played a tau army one round of hammer & anvil, and I had to just hope I could roll well enough to survive 3-4 turns of him shooting at me while I could do little to nothing in return until I got closer. I also had a similarly uphill battle going against grey knight acolyte spam army with 11 psybacks. I'm not saying there's not room for generalship, I'm just saying that as a deployment style it has a higher chance of leading to an inbalanced game than any other deployment.
1 reply · active 656 weeks ago
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morgendonner · 656 weeks ago

that said I loved the event and recommend it to everyone. I don't want to sound like a big complainer, I thought the event was excellent. Those are just some thoughts I had from the weekend.
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chumbalaya 79p · 656 weeks ago

I liked the missions a lot. Varied, but consistent overall, with a good fix to mysterious objectives. I wish terrain was that consistent everywhere.
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Lords2001's avatar

Lords2001 · 656 weeks ago

I would also say that vanguard and the big guns never tire and warlord traits need to be either standardized or removed - one game I had 4 heavy support choices to the opponents 0 - and another game I rolled the stealth in ruins warlord trait - ever tried to kill 12 vehicles sitting in 3+ cover when I had 4 ruins in deployment or movement range turn 1. or when the Necron player got rerolls to reserves with 8 flyers. Needs ... Work to make it vaguely fair.
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Algesan · 656 weeks ago

For what was being tried, namely a beta test for running 6th Ed GTs, it was pretty good. Turns run slower, that is a problem and needs to be addressed. One way is to allow players to deploy and give a decent amount of time to deploy when the computer is slow and pairings are posted late. Make the actual game time start with the seize the initiative roll. I don't think that is going to be enough though, players getting "faster" is a pipe dream when I took a list with 50% more models in it than my 5th list and if I'd had time to buy, assemble and paint more than I did, I'd have taken twice that. So no matter what I do, or how "used to the rules" I get, if I now field the list I would have preferred to, it will mechanically take me three times as long to move. With the new wound allocation rules, shooting rules, assault rules and premeasuring rules, it adds up to even more time.

Unfortunately, I don't have a solution yet. Some ideas, but not something I'd like to put out yet.
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billybox 52p · 656 weeks ago

I wasn't there, but I watched a couple games on the feed and I have one stupid question....

Were all those pink dice from 3++?

If so, that's some serious market penetration for a small operation.
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ace's avatar

ace · 656 weeks ago

the rules lent themselves heavily to all foot lists. not letting flyers count for anything meant flyer spam armies weren't the way to go (if you wanted wins). flyers will be balanced after GW hands out more flyers and anti air weapons, so the fact that they were generally hard to kill should be taken care of in some respect for next year just by codex and faq releases.

the missions really did penalize you for taking vehicles though, and they ended up being dead points. It's great that it stopped the 20 car pile up deployments, but it also discouraged you from taking ANY vechiles at all. even taking 3 hyper efficient valkyries puts you at a 420 point disadvantage, which is super hard to overcome (especially if you're wasting lascannons on 5pt guardsmen w/ cover saves).
2 replies · active 655 weeks ago
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MVB · 656 weeks ago

This actually isn't true, by the results. Only 2 of the top 16 lacked vehicles, and several of the top 16 were mech spam-tastic, including a couple of 5+ flyer armies.

Worth thinking over results, not one off impressions or analysis of winners only.
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Algesan · 655 weeks ago

I'm going to back Mike on this one. I more than "made my points" on my vehicle choices and they ate up... 575 points. They blew up other vehicles that were blowing up my troops, they blew up my opponents' troops and they soaked up firepower that would have been targeted on my troops.

Time is the big issue. Almost pulling out games that end on turn three when turn three is about the time I"m *starting* my serious lunge for objectives in games played without a time limit is a bigger problem. OTOH, I'll still have the same amount of vehicles even if I build a "faster" (as in less time to develop the situation) and a lot more foot heavy list. Which will play slower.

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