Lord Hanaur Posted February 20, 2017 Report Share Posted February 20, 2017 Most people are pretty familiar with the ITC Format. It uses the combination of Maelstrom and book objectives. More critically it requires you to score at the beginning of your turn on Maelstroms. It makes alpha striking armies, as people like to call them them, pretty powerful and encourages going first at all times (and in my opinion, maybe a bit too much). Another Format is the asymmetrical format, which is the one NOVA uses. In that system each person selects their objectives secretly from a menu of options before the mission after seeing the opposing force and then both reveal them. This is in the hopes of eliminating the extremely common complaint that some missions make certain matchups nigh unwinnable. Having "more units in no mans land that your opponent" as ITC does might be fair in many matchups but in certain ones, it absolutely isn't, such as those featuring a Battle Company. The NOVA format seeks to mitigate those "unfair matchups" more. Unlike the ITC where you roll 3 dice and eliminate undesirable missions as often as you can, the NOVA simply lets you choose them. Whoever executes their missions better wins. The Maelstrom-only Format which the Annihilation tournament uses. This uses the "tennis match" concept of scoring and so essentially you are playing against the vagaries of your deck. The deck is slimmed down to rid you of those missions that would not generally make sense for your force (but certainly does not stop them from being unattainable objoctives in actual play) and it encourages a pretty aggressive style of play, as you know going in you're going to have to be ready to cover a lot of ground and sacrifice men's lives regularly, which is a pretty different feel to the game than is typical. Mobility may be the most important component of any army in that format. MSU is encouraged pretty strongly in it as well. Yet another Format is what I refer to as Traditional 40K, wherein you are playing the book missions and scoring points at the end of the game as a rule (other than the Kill Points). This is instead of the steady accumulation of points you see in the other Formats. In this format you see that going second can be worthwhile and the game can be in doubt much longer than in the ITC missions, which tends to see someone running away with the Maelstrom side and the other person having to abandon it completely to try and win (Obviously not always the case, but it definitely happens). One virtue of traditional 40K as a format is simply that the game can be in doubt to the end of the game as long as one soldier remains and many are the tales of exactly that in bloodbath matchups. The downside of traditional 40K matchups is that they don't incorporate any X Factors into the game, and some people do enjoy the injection of more variety in their objectives and what that forces as far as list variety. that isnt really a consideration from a competitive standpoint, just an observation of different tastes. In that Format you are best served by not revealing the missions ahead of time. The Elvensword Ambassadorial GT uses a Traditional 40K Format with a dual objective variant, different in that the dual objectives are not worth the same balance of points as they are in ITC. In Traditional 40K you are aware of your objective from the word "go!", same as this format. However, in this format, an X Factor takes the form of just one new objective added as you reach Turn 2 instead of rolling every round (or drawing every round) for multiple objectives. The new objective does not change and is the same for both players. The upside of the Format is that armies are encouraged to use all their available unit types and options. Mission design values BOTH "take and hold" type force elements as well as aggressive Blitzkrieging units. As it is played with Composition rules that differ slightly, it tends to see more balanced, representative forces being represented and advantaged in order to accomplish the missions. The downside is that it does discourage the power builds and requires you to have a collection large enough to accomodate the change of gears. Units that may normally not get played as often find themselves in the Elvensword Arena. Are there other formats people know about that I could look at for running tournaments? I mean ITC points aside, which can be turned in for any event, i am most interested in learnign about other formats that are out there. If you know of any that are substantially different let me know. I'd like to take a look at them. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VonVilkee Posted February 20, 2017 Report Share Posted February 20, 2017 One bit about "traditional" 40k is that the major downside is time. There is an X factor but in competition under a time constraint it is typically lost. That random game length is the X Factor do I go now or not, in a tourney you can be Le well time will be called so it is safe now! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lord Hanaur Posted February 20, 2017 Author Report Share Posted February 20, 2017 One bit about "traditional" 40k is that the major downside is time. There is an X factor but in competition under a time constraint it is typically lost. That random game length is the X Factor do I go now or not, in a tourney you can be Le well time will be called so it is safe now! Random game lengths i think is part of all those formats. Am i misunderstanding? Obviously if the game isn't threatening to reach a 6th round time-wise, random game length is effectively pointless. Thats not unique to a Traditional 40K format? That does bring up a pretty interesting point though. Tournament play tends to disallow a game from total completion (not always, no, but plenty often enough). Competing is just a different beast and asking someone to go faster and make mistakes by doing it is no better than them intentionally going slow. Begs the question: are time limits a good thing? i mean lets just say that we took and gave three hours to everyone. MOST people would finish in three hours. Some few would not. Would the extra 20 minutes kill the whole event if we let them finish, given how few that would be? Wouldnt the tournament results be more accurate? of course they would. and armies would probably reflect this added freedom to "do their thing". T.O.'s dont like it because it gets them off schedule but i mean... The real question would be: does that matter that much? everyone wants to get home but how much longer would it REALLY take to finish all three games? dunno. It might be an interesting experiment to see how long games take in a tournament if there is no time limit. I know its crazy but If i start at 10:00, that's 9 projected hours at 3 hours per round. 7Pm is when we're done. Assume breaks and what not. 8PM. Would 9 Pm be so bad? Or maybe just extend the final round to have no limit? Surely the last game should be allowed to come to its logical conclusion right? Anywho, fun to think about. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VonVilkee Posted February 20, 2017 Report Share Posted February 20, 2017 It absolutely is fun to think about. While all formats have random game length, turn by turn scoring is in each to make it "fair". End of game time used to be a much bigger issue under score at the end. You could easily game the end of time, not that everyone did but you could. I liked long attrition based game play so way back I started using drop pods to speed up my games as I skipped deployment giving more time to actual game. This was my way of gaming the time limit. Right now shooting reigns partly because melee is more likely to run out of time to do what it does. Melee takes longer and at the high competition levels time concerns play into army construction. They have to, the more controllables you have the better a chance you have. 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lord Hanaur Posted February 21, 2017 Author Report Share Posted February 21, 2017 Yeah strong points. List building has without doubt been affected by the length of games. The Psyker phase was kind of a bad idea. Lol. that did NOT help things. So how opposed or supportive do you think people would be of allowing the last game to take as long as it takes? Extending just the one game? I know 3 hours is plenty for 1850 as long as people aren't dicking around too much (although then again...having fun should be part of the equation too...). Another interesting idea is this: 2.5 hours. After that, each remaining round is 10 minutes, five each player. Then all games absolutely end as they should. You'd get seven rounds in every time then. I don't know what the perfect answer is. I am exploring any other formats that are out there. This year i think it mixes things up and makes it more fun if we try different things. ITC is an easy cut and paste method to run an event but its not the only format out there. I think part of the challenge in being a good general is being adaptable. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AgentP Posted February 21, 2017 Report Share Posted February 21, 2017 Annihilation does not have random game length. That was something I deliberately did away with in creating the format. It's fine for a fun game, but I hate it in a tournament setting. 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VonVilkee Posted February 21, 2017 Report Share Posted February 21, 2017 Controllables... If you know the max turns, you can plan killing power vs survivability more as you know how long you need to go... 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted February 21, 2017 Report Share Posted February 21, 2017 Not that the 40k rules support it very well, but games with an Odd number of players are very good to take the "edge" off of compeditive gaming. Especially with maelstrom objectives, 3-player free for alls are fun and less prone to harsh compeditive playing. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Lord Hanaur Posted February 21, 2017 Author Report Share Posted February 21, 2017 Not that the 40k rules support it very well, but games with an Odd number of players are very good to take the "edge" off of compeditive gaming. Especially with maelstrom objectives, 3-player free for alls are fun and less prone to harsh compeditive playing. Sure but this thread is regarding competitive 40K and the formats for it. I'm looking for different formats and ideas for it. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Posted February 21, 2017 Report Share Posted February 21, 2017 Sure but this thread is regarding competitive 40K and the formats for it. I'm looking for different formats and ideas for it. Sorry, didn't think I was off topic. So the goal is a format that promotes compeditive play. Have you considered one where you have a % point cap on unit types? Like, no more than 25% of your army can be on models with the psyker rule (or just a hard cap on psychic dice per turn). Or no more than 25% can have the flyer/flying monsterous creature unit type. Or no more than 50% of your army can have the bike/jetbike unit type. A lot of the more compeditive builds seem to be focused around spamming a certain type of unit and just hoping the opponent can't cope with that many of that unit type. I think it would promote strategy if it was harder to spam only a certain unit type. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
winterman Posted February 21, 2017 Report Share Posted February 21, 2017 Many formats that are worth mentioning ETC missions is what the Europeans play, even for singles events. Like ITC it combines eternal war objective missions and maelstrom but uses more book style maelstrom (with some house rules like 18 cards, d3 VPs become flat 2, discard unobtainable cards and no more than 3 cards scored a turn) and kill points are scored every game on a differential (max 6 VPs). Unlike ITC, VPs are totaled rather than siloed into different objectives. Determining winners is a differential battle point system capped at 20 points, so if you outscore your opponent by 3 VPS you score 13 battle points and he scores 7. If you out score him by 10 VPs or more you get 20 and he gets 0. While its strengths are best used in team events or battle point events it can still function in a W/L/D system. The current packet with rules can be found here (note the mission rules are scattered throughout the packet): https://drive.google.com/file/d/0Bzus0DMobfGYZzJjQjM5dE9WZ28/view Adepticon has its own flavor of missions. Often controversial of late, they were the pioneers of the primary, secondary, tiertiary style of mission which gave multiple paths to victory rather than one - all the way back in 4ed, This years primers are out: http://www.adepticon.org/wpfiles/2017/201740KChampPrimer.pdf - Its looks like a combo of ETC and ITC ideas. Only just saw them so no opinion on them yet but they remind me of a format I made back in 5ed. Previous years are also available: http://www.adepticon.org/?page_id=680 Astronomi-con is a long running Canadian tournament series which features a unique mission format. Each table has its own mission, themed to the terrain and/or including a number of other things like a third 'army' that both players have to deal with. It is not a format intended for competitive evaluation, but its still competitive and tests a generals ability to adapt. We shamelessly borrow this idea for our own event in the Fall - the Harvester of Souls. We look at it as a palate cleanser towards the end of the ITC year, something different than the typical event played the prior months. They used to post some variety of their missions on line but they have since stopped doing that. But if you are interested in the entire event format you can find it here: https://astronomiconportal.wordpress.com/ GW themselves had some interesting ideas around randomly generated assymetrical objectives (not maelstrom, these tended to be endgame missions) called Rules of Engadgement. The 4ed rules can be found here: http://www.dakkadakka.com/dakkaforum/posts/downloadAttach/35905.page 2 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
VonVilkee Posted February 21, 2017 Report Share Posted February 21, 2017 Loved the harvester mission by table stuff! 1 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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