New Scenario with optional House Rules

[Crablezworth]

Ok so this scenario has 3 optional rules played only if both players agree to use them. 

 

What I'm trying to address is make the game less top weighted/front heavy as this is a big impediment to scaling up point levels. What's happening commonly in games is a very exhausting first turn or two followed by one player tapping out. A few things conspire to make this a common occurrence, I can't tackle all of them as army construction is still very permissive but the goals are to limit planes impact somewhat, as some players have entire air forces and others have not been able to secure a single plane. But not only that, the sheer weight of fire one can bring in wherever they want with ample pre measuring is leading not to cool dogfights but just a lot of feels bad. 

 

Infiltrate has rendered transports in many ways a lot less useful or needed. It's also handed out like water in a heat wave, there are no guard rails or limits at all. Why invest in rhinos or dracosan or land raiders or spartans or hell even air transports if the majority of your army can deploy wherever it wants. I don't want to live in a world where the meta is both players placing dozens of AA tarantulas in no man's land to the point where my beautiful board has all ability to suspend disbelief drained from it entirely. Infiltrators are still given a choice to deploy in their deployment zone or be given outflank and placed in reserve. 

 

The last fix is also very needed I feel. Because the core game always has 6's hitting. This is a problem because there is no interaction with, for example, targeting a detachment in cover or occupying a structure. If you're already needing 6, nothing can render that any worse, but also nothing can turn that 6 simply into a cannot shoot.  What this means in effect is overwatch's penalty to hit often is irrelevant, as you may be waning to overwatch a detachment in -2 cover or a flyer without having skyfire. When you cynically combine this with inexpensive units with high volume or high quality of fire, like 8 sentinels putting out 24-32 shots for a whole 100pts or 10 contemptor dreadnoughts with accurate lascannons for 160pts, these detachments largely don't care about needing 6's to hit, either because of sheer volume of fire or the fact that they re-roll missed shots. The change of limiting overwatch to first fire is these units at least can no long advance and then overwatch, they must commit to first fire and not move in order to be able to do this. This change would not affect weapons with point defense. 

 

 

 

 

 

[DuskRaider]

I get what you’re saying, but I think making an army Infiltrate in their own DZ only kinda defeats the purpose. I really do wish GW put a limiter on it, especially when considering it’s a pretty powerful trait while other Legions or Formations are quite lacking in comparison. 
 

If I can only designate two pieces of area terrain of four buildings as Dangerous Terrain, I don’t see why there’s not a limiting factor on the amount of units that can use Infiltration… and I don’t just mean the choices, but the number of units in a Formation that can use it. It would certainly cut down on the hijinks. I also don’t want to feel as though I’m being forced to take opposing Infiltration units in order to counter the opponent’s units. 
 

 At this point it is what it is. Maybe GW will step in and impose a hard limit on it, but seeing as how they’re seemingly tone deaf and don’t understand that most 30K players want to collect a large amount of a single Legion instead of playing Skittles I doubt it’ll happen. 

[Crablezworth]

52 minutes ago, DuskRaider said:

I get what you’re saying, but I think making an army Infiltrate in their own DZ only kinda defeats the purpose. I really do wish GW put a limiter on it, especially when considering it’s a pretty powerful trait while other Legions or Formations are quite lacking in comparison. 
 

 

The problem is any amount I allow I just as arbitrary as allowing none to infiltrate. And because the limit would have to be the same for both side, even allowing up to 3 to infiltrate normally, that's now really 6 when u factor the max combined from both sides. In other games, infiltrate has/had a bigger pushback than 4 inches. The reality too is a single detachment  could be like 4 models, it could also be 16 models. At approx 1inch per base and 2 inches coherency, that's an 81 square in chunk of real estate, (9x8 inches) and that's being nice and assuming a nice square deployment. 1 16 model detachment deployed in a line covers almost 48 inches, and with 4 inch push pack in each direction to enemy infiltrators, creating an area of 384 square inches or 2.3 square feet. I can get 6 of these at 1500pts. And there's another 18 detachments that can infiltrate along with them. 

 

I'm open to suggestions but like even allowing more that a few infiltrators per side just janks everything up. It's not even like infantry is slowed by, like, anything. They're not even slowed scaling sheer cliff faces, u can march order a mountain already, being able to just deploy there just start to defeat the purpose imo. 

[LameBeard]

Could we try switching out infiltrate for a scout move / forward deployment type thing (or outflank, as you have done)?

[Crablezworth]

I want outflank to incentivize use of reserves, because currently the only way to even put a unit in reserve is outflank or deep strike. I could add language that would explicitly allow players to still deploy detachments with infiltrate last after normal deployments but they must decide then on a 1 to 1 alternating whether those detachments are deploying in friendly deployment zone or taking outflank and going into reserve. That would still allow for some flexibility and for both players to read their opponents actions "well he's going to outflank those, I'll outflank these then." What I'd be trying to do there is to leverage the reality that outflank simply allows players to choose which board edge a detachment arrives on other than the opponents so helps give counter play to both sides and also baits more reserves to help keep activation count under control early on. 

 

Edited February 26 by Crablezworth

[LameBeard]

I like the idea of controlling early activation count. I am also likely to be constrained by relatively small board size.

 

So I might house-rule a portion of the army (30%?) forced into more “traditional” reserves (coming on own board edge) and then given infiltrators the outflank buff, so gives them an advantage if they are in that 30%.

 

Since I read that: stuff can move quickly, stuff dies quickly, there’s progressive scoring, I think this could all tie together nice.

 

And when I say “traditional” reserves, this doesn’t need to be random rolls: we can give both players certainty that its turn 2, turn 3 or whatever.

[DuskRaider]

15 hours ago, Crablezworth said:

 

The problem is any amount I allow I just as arbitrary as allowing none to infiltrate. And because the limit would have to be the same for both side, even allowing up to 3 to infiltrate normally, that's now really 6 when u factor the max combined from both sides. In other games, infiltrate has/had a bigger pushback than 4 inches. The reality too is a single detachment  could be like 4 models, it could also be 16 models. At approx 1inch per base and 2 inches coherency, that's an 81 square in chunk of real estate, (9x8 inches) and that's being nice and assuming a nice square deployment. 1 16 model detachment deployed in a line covers almost 48 inches, and with 4 inch push pack in each direction to enemy infiltrators, creating an area of 384 square inches or 2.3 square feet. I can get 6 of these at 1500pts. And there's another 18 detachments that can infiltrate along with them. 

 

I'm open to suggestions but like even allowing more that a few infiltrators per side just janks everything up. It's not even like infantry is slowed by, like, anything. They're not even slowed scaling sheer cliff faces, u can march order a mountain already, being able to just deploy there just start to defeat the purpose imo. 

I honestly don’t have an answer for this problem. It certainly is an issue and I do think it breaks immersion and feels gamey to me but I also feel that it’s not my place to limit another player’s abilities.

 

I’ll be honest with you, it kinda put me in a sour mood when my buddy declared that he was playing Pioneer Company with 4 Marauders and Thunderbolts but by the end of Turn One he lost almost all of it when I literally wiped the buildings off the map. It does give an advantage to capturing Objectives but to be fair I COULD bring Infiltrating Units but I choose to play Mono-Legion so I technically handicapped myself for the sake of the theme / fluff. 

[Crablezworth]

5 hours ago, DuskRaider said:

I honestly don’t have an answer for this problem. It certainly is an issue and I do think it breaks immersion and feels gamey to me but I also feel that it’s not my place to limit another player’s abilities.

 

I’ll be honest with you, it kinda put me in a sour mood when my buddy declared that he was playing Pioneer Company with 4 Marauders and Thunderbolts but by the end of Turn One he lost almost all of it when I literally wiped the buildings off the map. It does give an advantage to capturing Objectives but to be fair I COULD bring Infiltrating Units but I choose to play Mono-Legion so I technically handicapped myself for the sake of the theme / fluff. 

 

I don't think hard limit are always needed if the incentives line up, but the problem is there are very few hard limits, things that are taxes are not always feeling like taxes, that's a problem at like formation level, why not just make a whole army from pioneer companies, the tax is basically 4 veletarii and an hq because rapiers/tarantulas don't really feel like a tax, especially with how inexpensive the tarantulas are. The problem is compounded as well by the fact you can fit almost 10 bare bones formations in like 2k as there are no limits on formations currently. Events are going to have to set some kind of limits, whether limit on formation or a max model count for sanity. 

 

That's the problem I have that, I want combined arms, I don't see any fun in a game where the skew is so strong u can have whole tank or plane armies. The approach I feel works best though is tying changes to the scenario itself, so when people get upset like "you're changing the core game" I can at least say my goal is to change it in the context of playing this specific scenario, or not. I don't want people to feel like I'm coming for "their" game, I want to present it more like traditonal expansions of the past, like planetsrike in 40k, where you and opponent decide whether to play a "planetsrike" game, so it works more like it should, a separate expansion with a specific goal/kind of battle in mind. 

 

So my hope is to contain the scenario special rules/house rules to strictly optional with opponents consent sorta thing and if an event I run has them in effect, people will know ahead of time and be able to make the call if that's their kinda thing. The benefit at least is, if players know they're playing this scenario they can and hopefully will build their armies/lists accordingly.  I hope at least.