Romes

Here's the army I'm bringing to OFCC. It ended up being a 12.8. More detail pics to come.

Signing up!

This was a non-end times event. Out of the book 8th ed + scenarios.

Jeremy, Thanks for running a great event. It ran very smoothly and I really enjoyed it. I had 5 great games against nice guys. Scoring feedback (edit: for future events): I would steer away from using VPs instead of BPs to determine the best general. In this case the result was the same, but straight VPs often awards army types over generalship. For example, you could have a lizardman player who plays a tight tournament, wins every game, and averages 1200 points a game. You could have a warriors player who shoves forward and gets 2500 3 games and 0 the other two. The lizards could even beat him 1200-0 in game 5 in this scenario. The warrior player than wins best general with 7.5K to 6k. VPs rewards carnage level, which is largely a function of the army rather than the player. The terrain was great, I was impressed that that many battle mats were available, they were really nice. Also glad you were able to get the store to let us in an hour before opening, that was big for getting home Sunday. Thanks again for running the event! -Matt

This is really a question for your local play groups. There are groups that have no interest in end times at all and others that are fine with everything except Khaine magic. Most events don't use end times, though some do. I would say, since it seems like you're planning on playing some casual games with your new army, as long as you are not trying to power game your list, you'll be OK. Remember technically there's no restriction against triple cannon double steam tank, or a 24 man warlock bus with 6 characters, but some opponents may not be interested in a game against it. Also to consider is that until 9th comes out it's hard to tell the longevity of the models.

The rankings swing pretty wildly until at least 15-20 people have attended 3+ events each. They never look right before that.

I'm glad you like comp for the build diversity it provides, through whatever mechanism, but I want to challenge you on your statements about balance. The language here on balance appears to me (maybe i'm misreading) to be exactly the mentality I was explaining earlier. Your personal experiences in paragraph 2 do not provide sufficient evidence to support your claim in paragraph one, for all the reasons discussed in my previous post. The paragraph one claim seems, to me, to be unsupported. You' appear to be making a fairly blanket statement, that 3rd party attempts to balance the game cannot succeed, and I think you really need to examine where you're coming from with that, and why. Do you mean that comp cannot contribute to a MORE balanced game, or that it cannot make the game perfectly balanced? I think most people would agree it doesn't get you from 0 to 100, but there is value in the distance from 0 to 50. Do you believe that "janky swedish filth" in a banded swedish event is as powerful as uncomped hard lists can be? Or is it also a harder list than your comfortable playing against, but to a lesser extent? *EDIT: I should add that I totally agree with your third paragraph, I also would rather attend a variety of event types under different comps and even no comp, then have every event have the same comp set.

Here's the real TLDR: If you're trying to determine if comp works based on your personal tournament experience in uncomped GTS: Experimental evidence is only valuable if it is both statistically significant and free of confounding causal factors. I'd argue that what we have is neither, so all that's left is the realm of theory. Which is all, of course, a different question than: is comp needed?

I think in a tournament environment where are a substantial subset of the players trying to win in the strategy game rather than purely the beer game(which is equally as legitimate, to each their own), comp adds value and makes for a better event. Not all events are like this, and some events and communities rebel against the idea of comp because they would rather that no one attending consider the game primarily as competitive. I think there's a long discussion to have there. But it's not what I want to talk about. I want to tell you that comp is absolutely effective, and here's why: (this is a persuasive section, and will have some non-qualified language, please don't flame!) A good comp: Promotes list diversity, reduces the rock paper scissors nature of the game by preventing extremes, and makes armies closer to the same power level. I think a lot of the confusion about whether or not comps do this (Swedish is the most obvious example) is an issue of accumulated anecdotal evidence. When you compare the lists at a swedish event to the lists at a no comp event you recently attended you'll usually be able to say, "look this 30-40 man GT I went to had just as much list diversity, and not very many people brought OP stuff, who needs comp?" You, dear non-tldr reader, can probably think of some events like this. This is because many, if not most, people playing Warhammer: A: aren't trying to bring he filthiest thing they can, and B: don't have the money/time/interest in going out and building the most powerful option. Their is social pressure against doing so, internalized norms, and community values, reputation/ $. This is comp in itself, it's just not formalized comp, it's the super subjective comp of "that would be lame." The point is, most lists at this mystical GT your picturing, (probably whichever one you last attended), weren't written to be broken. But moving on. In my experience, in any given small GT (30-40) there's maybe 20%-50% of the field there to be competitive and of them at least half,usually more, are self comping in some way. The subset that is there to be competitive also has wildly different experience levels. You then have a very small subset of players who are both bringing competitive lists and are experienced players (10%-25%). Pairings, and when that subset faces each other, make a massive difference in the small population set for determining results. So you see variety, you see diversity, and other many of the podium armies aren't the filth. Maybe a round 5 pairing on table 4 has an experienced player with a well rounded list against a less experienced player with a powerful list that, when unstopped, gets big wins, but has some real weaknesses (looking at you daemon prince!) Player A wins, and big, and takes home the gold (insert another million theoretical examples). There are simply too few players both experienced and taking powerful armies over too few rounds, for a clear pattern to come out of the power level difference and define the results. So, when you compare comp to the local GT, it's easy to say "meh, not really needed." So what does comp do: Take a hard boyz scenario, everyone brings the filthiest thing they can with the focus purely on winning. In 8th, (before endtimes) this is maybe 4-5 lists, they look exactly the same, and they should. You'll see Kairos/Epidemus/2 SC, fully powered HE white lion banner Allerielle deathstars with double frost, which beats Epidemus, and lists from the other competitive books that are optimized to beat the HE deathstar, but get destoryed by daemons. You might see light council IF there are a lot of daemons. From each army book every list looks pretty much the same. This relationship is mirrored in MTG for the early ravager period, you had ravager, RG anti ravager, and rouge (everything else) which beat anti ravager and lost to ravager. It's not a great environment because if people are close to the same skill you can pretty much determine the outcome with the pairings computer. boo. What swedish does to this environment is MASSIVE. There is no longer one build per book, every book (maybe not beastmen?) is valid and competitive. There are at a minimum 20 solid builds in the game (+ a lot of experimental rogue builds where people finally take double giant cause they're comp cheap), but really a lot of variety within them (usually about 1800 points of in book overlap). Now the tournament is fun. So, when you're asking does comp work (make the game more balanced and increasediversity), ask what it would do to a hard boyz event. Yes, it works. Does your event need comp? You'll probably only benefit by the difference between what your event looks like and a Swedish event looks like, which may not be a ton, and may decide it's not needed. Just don't decline comp because you think it doesn't work. A final thought: In my experience the people who most often are the strongest advocates for comp are the same ones bringing the hard lists. I don't bring hard lists because I want auto wins, I bring them because I don't want auto-losses. A one sided games is not what gets people into the hobby. TLDR - There's no TLDR here! scroll up BWAHAHAHAHAHA

Ha, yeah I know, your whole post was about not worrying about it. I wasn't disagreeing with you. I was just laughing because "woooo 96 comp extra rank go!"

This made me chuckle because of the thought of worrying about a 3rd rank of warlocks in Swedish. Swedish people do not permit this many warlocks. The do not enjoy warlocks. =P

I'm looking forward to it. This will be the last pre-end times/no-other-comp/8th ed event. Everything else either is actively comped or allows ET stuff. Should be a good goodbye to an edition!

Thanks Drak! I just wanted to encourage everyone to vote in this. I've played with both of the guys running and they're both great guys who are invested in contributing the the community.

Also, another reason this result doesn't really inform us on the utility of the +100/-100 point method, is, because that scoring method was not in play, people did not need to optimize their lists to their comp score. They could (and did) take options that were very comp inefficient, because there was no cost in doing so. This isn't a problem with how the comp was implemented, just a difference, and a difference that affects what lists get brought and what comp scores you see. I understand the want to believe that it's only the general that matters, but I think that if you want to present that perspective it's important to use evidence which is methodologically compatible to the arguments you want to support. None of this should take anything away from players who did well in the event with softer lists, if anything I'd argue their performance was more impressive than the end results, I was super impressed with where Raindog and Moses finished. In an active comp system they would probably have been rank 1 and 2 for doing so well with softer lists.

Thanks for a great tournament everyone, especially the Black Sheep Gang, who ran it super smoothly. I especially liked the scenarios as they felt like they had a real, determinate, effect on almost every game. Iraf, Respectfully, I wouldn't pull that conclusion from the spreadsheet. Look at Raindog's sports and paint score. His 2nd placement includes amazingly high paint and sports. (which is super impressive - it just doesn't have anything to do with comp, so this doesn't really undermine the comp/battle score relationship.) If you want to look at how the lists end up relative to their comp scores you should rank the results by only the in game variables (battle + narrative). To be clear, I really like the weighting BSB used, but it you're trying to pull conclusions about the utility of the comp system out of it, you should restrict the scores to the in game categories and re-organize. (I tried to do this myself to take a look at the results but found out it's an image file!). *edit: I'd be really curious to see what this looks like if someone with the file would want to do it.

I just had a thought - your question may come from instances like the chaos warshrine, which does not confer it's own ward save to the character. In that case, against because it's split profile, the ward save is part of the chariot, and not the rider. In general (sometimes it is specifically stated otherwise) abilities of the chariot affect the chariot, abilities of, or gear bought by, the rider, affect the rider.

Hey, You're talking about this entry: Gorthol (Black Orc Big Boss): Armour of Destiny; Orc Boar Chariot; shield; Battle Standard. 252 Characters and the chariots they ride have separate profiles, just like pre-end times ridden monsters. Therefore, attacks can be allocated against either the chariot or the rider. You receive the ward save when the character is attacked, but not when the chariot is attacked. Note that characters on chariots both, separately, take characteristics tests (like initiative tests), and are affected separately. Characters and chariots are BOTH hit by a cannon, rolling to wound separately, in this case as well you get a ward save against the cannon hit on the character, but not the hit on the chariot.

Maybe the new fluff will have a map that's not weirdly the normal world? 0.0