King Mekhet

Which is exactly my point. Clubs are required to play their game. You're always going to lose people like Fluger, who simply aren't willing to invest the time/money to change. However the rest of us will buy a few units here or there, even (heaven forbid) rebase a bunch of minis. ...but we're not going to do that if they invalidate our entire army. Much more likely that they just reprinted all the rules for our units in whatever 9th edition is. Notice that they've pulled books, but not models. Also that we haven't had anything more than laughable, token FAQ updates in what...2 years? Most likely nobody at GW FAQ was willing to spend their time FAQing rules that were about to be replaced wholesale.

Interesting. Means we won't have to wait very long, at least.

And who are all these new entrants going to play against? Who will teach them the rules? To paint? It certainly won't be one of GW's one-man stores, which have enough room for a pickup game but not a sustainable gaming club. Yes...people buying the book, the magic cards, and a unit or two with every new release isn't exactly enough to sustain the game. To do that GW needs people buying entire new armies. But...who - if not us - is that going to be? As to why GW would keep mass battles around, I say for the same reason as for why they have formats like Apocalypse around: people love having big battles with loads of figures on the table. I would say much moreso for WHFB than for 40K, where massed armies are iconic to the genre. I've also seen plenty of people with 20-man units of witches. They're a cheap, disposable unit that will bite a chunk out of most enemy units before being dragged down. Making a proper cauldron star out of them is a big point commitment.

And what...throw out their entire existing customer base, with decades of accumulated good will, for an untested skirmish game? Absolutely not. That's insanity. It doesn't take much to convert a square-base game into a round-base game. People have been doing it with demons for years and nobody bats an eye. Other companies already put out conversion trays for to rank the round models up for fantasy. It does make things somewhat more difficult for base-contact effects, but I suggest those are on the way out with the next edition anyways. And good riddance, since that mechanic is the reason obnoxious character walls are ascendant in the meta right now. If it's easy to convert a skirmish force to a mass battle force, then it DOES become a gateway product. It becomes very easy to ramp a small skirmish force into an allied mass battle force into a standalone battle force. Which is what GW wants to do: encourage us to buy more models. A skirmish force that you cap out fairly quickly doesn't do that. A force which has cross-compatibility with a larger game format does. Essentially, I think GW has realized that the present state of WHFB is much more like Apocalypse than it is like WH40k. It needs that smaller scale entry point to help with scaleability and ease of entry, but currently lacks it.

I really don't think that WHFB is failing as hard as people think it is. I think GW is simply looking at the product and realizing that their sales volumes are staying roughly stagnant while the HUGE number of new entrants to the genre shows very clearly that there is room for growth that they're simply not capturing. Thus why I really don't believe that GW is going to simply abandon mass battle. *ESPECIALLY* after they produced all these wonderful End Times books, which were quite expensive and clearly weren't meant to simply eke out a bit of extra money from us before they throw us to the wolves. That's not something a publicly traded, for-profit company does. No...much more likely that the End Times was conceived of as a marketing blitz to drum up support for their new product: a GW entrant into the small-to-medium scale skirmish genre. Everyone who plays WHFB knows that it breaks down once you drop below 1,000 points. As well that the price of entry into the hobby is enormously large, and is a huge factor in driving off new players. As for GW caring about the models we own...of course they care. It might be money in the bank to them, but they also anchor us to their product. Invalidate someone's range of models and suddenly they're not loyal customers anymore. That's been GW's business plan all along: use that initial investment to convince people to buy more models. Thus the incremental codex shifts, where a few units that were good in the old codex become bad, and the bad units become good. The better looking units have worse rules, while the uglier units have the best rules. What does giving us a new edition do for GW? It shifts the goal posts, and causes us to buy a few different models here or there to keep our armies updated. Releasing a skirmish game? It makes it easier for us to start a new army to use in skirmish. Add in ally rules to the mass battle game? Suddenly we have a reason to GROW that skirmish force, so that we can ally it into our existing game. Same thing they did with End Times. The TK armybook sold out almost immediately after Nagash was released...because of VC players buying it to add into their armies. The VC book then sold out, on the backs of the Lore of Undeath. We got models available to several armies at once. Get enough undead models for Undeath and suddenly you're most of the way to a VC army. And then a TK army. ....all of which is substantially the same as what they've done with WH40K. No big shocks there.

Lol @ Dakka. That place is just a cesspool of 40K players, still whining about the two games of WHFB they played 5 years ago when the edition hit. Oh, yeah? Please tell me more about how broken steadfast hordes and mindrazor are, please...

And lo, did Games Workshop say "let them play Mass Battle," and they did play mass battle, and drink beer, and verily did the good times roll.

GW cares about mass battle because it sells models... ...to people who are already playing the game. Notice how much all of us have spent over the years? Yeah...GW likes that. The issue with 8th isn't the game, nor even sales, it's *NEW CUSTOMERS*. Very tough to get new customers when your game costs $500-900 to get a proper sized army. Skirmish games are much easier to get into. Problem is that people cap out on what they need fairly quickly, and their motivation to buy further models drops off. They're left either expanding their present army with uncompetitive models, or starting a new faction. But if you're starting a new faction, why make it Warhammer when it could just as easily be Darklands? Or Warmachine? Thus why if you're GW, you want both. Skirmish gets customers in, mass battle keeps them there and keeps them spending. The two games form a symbiotic bond, with an end result that is stronger (and more profitable) than either on their own. ...or at least in theory.

Best way to get it is to google "Swedish Komp". It's the first link that pops up. From there, the dropbox that Matt just posted is the place to go. So glad to put that knowledge on the shelf for the foreseeable future. So very, very sick of Swedish...

-20 for an automatic dispel AND a 50% chance to get rid of said spell is absolutely fair value. That's roughly 0.7 for the scroll, then 1.3 for the chance to dispel...pretty fair AFAIC.

I never said they were good - just that they were obnoxious. Swedish dwarfs don't generally win, and as a result the standard dwarf gunline build is quite undercomped. Thus they're starting up with a VP advantage on you, and if you just run across the table at them you'll likely bleed more points than you'll get out of their stubborn bricks. Instead the usual strategy is to just set up hidden behind hills and take the draw / minor loss instead. Swedish dwarfs don't win tournaments...they just prevent *other* people from winning tournaments. The pool of people in the running for the podium essentially shrinks to "who drew the fewest dwarf opponents?" Part of this is the comp pack being poorly written. The rest is the dwarf book itself being poorly designed. Castling up behind big stubborn bricks is NOT a fun way to play warhammer, and running at that castle is even worse. Hopefully 9th does something with the book that makes them actually enjoyable to face.

[nevermind] As for my team, I just gave everyone free reign to make a list they were comfortable with. I think we ended up with a decent range in the end. Giving people a target comp score is all well and good, but their actually having painted models on hand for that is a very different story. If I was asked to write a 16-comped list I don't think I would be able to do it without painting a couple hundred worth in new models.

I for one am glad that they blew up the world. The WHFB lore has been stale for years, the clock stuck at 5 minutes to midnight. It was badly in need of a shakeup. Current rumours also almost all point towards a skirmish game IN PARALLEL WITH the current mass battle game, to be used as an entry point. People need to chill. I'll put good money down at this point that 9th is going to be just as good as 8th is.

Well that's a shame. Now we Canucks can't give you guys a thumping to get vengeance for taking all our prizes at VoD ;)

Super looking forward to 9th edition. I'm nervous as to the form it is going to take, but I'm remaining cautiously optimistic that the general spirit of the game as we play it now will remain somehow. I think GW is just realizing that they need some kind of natural launchpad for fantasy, as expecting people to shell $500-900 before their army is playable is a bit much. A skirmish component would also make it really easy for people to start up new armies. You buy a demon skirmish force, with the idea of adding it to your warriors force as allies for bigger battles. Then before you know it you have as many demons as you do warriors. Makes it much easier for people to justify purchasing new plastic crack for themselves. That said, I don't see unit fillers going away. I suspect we'll see an end to specific model placement making a difference, meaning that your badass characters can go on big scenic display bases rather than tiny little 20mm bases inside of units. Easy enough to just carve that into a unit filler in the middle of a unit. Necromancer standing ontop of a mausoleum, tendrils of magic coaxing hordes of freshly dead out of their graves....right in the middle of a 100-man zombie brick.

Haha. Yeah, they hammered Undeath on TK as well. It's basically not worth taking. Good riddance on the dwarfs, though. Swedish dwarfs were obnoxious. I'm not paying all that money for tickets and hotels to sit behind a hill and take the draw.

Swedish v16.0 just dropped. I'm assuming this is the pack we'll be using for the tournament, barring 16.1 being released prior to June 1?

Last Swedish list I'm going to have to write for a while. So excited. Gods damned am I sick of writing Swedish lists.

The greater issue is that ALL games require opponent's consent. Your opponent can refuse to play you if you're fielding double nurgle prince or triple frost phoenix, for instance. If they don't want to play against Morghasts or Stormfiends then that's their prerogative. In terms of tournaments, they generally restrict lists by content source. So if they don't allow ET units then you're SoL. Other times they'll restrict you to only current armybooks, in which case Morghasts / Stormfiends are fine (but you should probably make sure with the TO first).

Write battle reports?

What an odd sentiment. I would much prefer to stick to a general *theme*, but make minor tweaks here and there until the army is the best you can make it based on your theme. Then play that army until you tire of it, then throw out the theme and try something new.

Swedish certainly lowers the bar in terms of the level of competitiveness you see in the lists. However, what I'm saying it does *not* do is create a level playing field. People can still make lists under Swedish that are orders of magnitude more powerful than their comp score suggests, purely through massaging their choices to game the comp system. A Swedish list is built to play *in* a Swedish environment, thus if you take it outside that system it is of course going to struggle. However what I'm saying is that pairing two lists of similar Swedish scores isn't necessarily going to guarantee an even matchup. Moreover, even under a comp pack like Swedish you are STILL going to get runaway builds in terms of power level compared to the meta. The pack knocks out certain "apex predators" in terms of powerful unit choices, which can cause a resurgence of certain choices that were - because of those "apex predators" - previously uncompetitive, but which are now tremendously more powerful. The pack also forces certain types of weird builds (like character-heavy infantry blocks) that you wouldn't see outside this pack, and which make other strange choices that counter those weird builds much more competitive as well. Not to mention that more complex comp systems like Swedish *really* reward players who are good at list writing. The "13" that a strong player builds versus a "13" that a less experienced player builds are going to be drastically different...I would say worse than in an uncomped environment. You bring in a huge host of additional factors that the less experienced player won't see, and which just serves to widen the gap between them. The TL;DR is that under any comp pack, given enough time, people will find all the holes and build lists that are substantially more powerful than the rest of the field. Same as in uncomped. The difference is that these builds are not the same ones as in uncomped, or under a different comp pack, which makes it interesting. EDIT: One other point is judged comp. I think it gets around a lot of the issues that hard comp systems like ETC or Swedish have, wherein a player can meticulously game the comp system to create lists that are harder than they should be. However judged comp has its own issues. First of all, judges are not perfect. They have imperfect knowledge of each armies' abilities. They have biases. They are also working off a much more limited set of experiences than a system like Swedish, which is based off of input from a very substantial community and fine-tuned over a long period of time. Second is the bias towards "obvious" filth versus "hidden" filth, being synergies and battlefield utility. People will perceive a list where you've just jammed a bunch of mean choices into an army at a higher level than an army with a bunch of moderate choices that all compliment each other very well. Now it may be that the latter style is more fun to play (and thus rewarding it in comp points could achieve your comp's objective). However come to the tabletop the synergy build could thrash the "power" build nine times out of ten...despite being comped "softer." Is that balance? Third and final point is meta. People who play in the region holding the GT will know what other people play, and are influenced in what is "hard" and what is "soft" based on the builds they've faced before and the people running them. However, get someone from outside that system running something in a very different style and suddenly it's a very different beast. I used to think that Ogres were a brainless "push it forward" army...until I saw the shooty ogre gunline in action. Or that dwarfs without warmachines were soft as chips until they're vanguarded into my half of the board turn 1 and I'm facing down a hundred stubborn S6 dwarfs about to charge me next turn. Whelp. Until you've faced those things you just don't know, and thus it's hard to judge their comp fairly and evently. Not to mention that if you end up on the bad end of a "rock-meets-scissors" matchup you're invariably going to think that list was harder, even if that was your fault for building a list that was really vulnerable to that particular playstyle. Is it fair to get punished just because you beat someone?

Okay, I'll bite. No third-party comp pack is going to truly "fix" the game, if that's even something that is possible to do. The WHFB meta is a complex ecosystem, and like a real world ecosystem any changes you make will result in consequences you couldn't have foreseen. Comp cannons down too hard and suddenly monsters (and ridden monsters) become exponentially more powerful. Hammering unit sizes (like Swedish and ETC do) makes people just jam their units full of characters instead. Will a "janky Swedish filth" list beat out uncomped list in a straight fight? Of course not. But in the context of a Swedish event, I would argue that the janky filth is every bit as unbalancing as the uncomped filth is. Again, this is just a meta thing. When you know people will be bringing the filth you make build choices with that in mind. Enough people bring counters and suddenly those lists get pushed off the top tables, and other builds rise into ascendence. However if you knock out those apex predators (like you do in ETC) then people don't have to waste space in their lists bringing answers to those filthy lists and can bring other stuff...things that might make their list even nastier than it was before. Player comp can help with that, but it's also kind of a crap shoot. Quite frankly, most players out there aren't familiar enough with the other armies out there to be good judges of how nasty they are. It could be that they drew a bad matchup. It could be that their opponents' dice were just really hot (making things seem a lot meaner than they are with average rolls). It could also be that they were just outplayed, and are misperceiving that as a filthy list. Other people get off easy because they made some obvious concession to "fluff" jammed into an otherwise a half-step away from pure filth. This is why I'm in favour of comp simply for the variety reason. Having different events running different combinations of comped and uncomped makes them interesting. It makes you learn a new style of play and grow as a player. However what it will NOT do is level the playing field. Best you can hope for is to switch it up a bit.

I'm a big fan of comp. Not because I think it balances the game (it doesn't), nor makes it more fair (it doesn't), nor improves the play experience (it doesn't). I like comp for the simple fact that it changes up the meta. Players have to think outside the box, and as a result you see a different variety of lists, builds, and playstyles on the field. Though again...they are not BETTER lists, just DIFFERENT. The sort of janky filth you'll see at Swedish tournaments is no less obnoxious than the stuff you'll see at uncomped tournaments, and by-and-large there will always be armies that the comp pack leaves in the dust. It just might be a different set of armies than in another format. Thus I'm a big fan of comped events, so long as not ALL of the events use the same comp pack. A bit of variety is the sweet spot for me. Enough tournaments with one pack to make it worthwhile buying, modelling, and painting the additional models. However enough differently comped events out there so that you're not bringing and facing the same build over and over again.

Sad to see Dan not joining us at OFCC this year. Of course the one year I can actually make this tournament is the one year the rest of the Canadian crew decides to stay home. Booo-urns! Our current government is actually very right wing, funnily enough. Unlike your commie Kenyan president ;)