So today while playing one of my usual opponents we got into a good discussion on tournament and mission design and if it really helps 6th edition. It was a good conversation on what missions should look like in 6th. The Nova being a central point, especially since I am playing in the "Nova Formatted" BFS as of right now in a month that became a central talking point in the conversation. While I am open to almost any format my opponent did not agree with how the NOVA styles its missions. So what is the Nova style?
In the most basic form it is a 3 mission format that uses a primary with a secondary missions as tie breakers if the previous mission was a tie. Seems simple enough right? Yet in the simpleness lies its one flaw and that it can be gamed, hard. Since you know you will always have atleast one mission in play you can design a list to tie 2 of the three and almost always win the third. We saw this heavily in the end of 5th with Paladin lists being almost unbeatable in these style tournaments. Yet the game changes and so does the rules but the Nova format stays the same. So even with the emphasis taken away from kill point denial lists can it still be gamed. In this edition large units, infantry based fluid lists and other similar styles are a lot more popular. So this tends to switch the emphasis to quarters. How so?
Quarters can be gamed quite heavily with blob guard or mass infantry lists. Yet almost all of these units are troops so the emphasis can quickly shift over to objectives and even KP with such large units. These styles of armies can rule a game of Nova Format 6th. So it now seems quarters is the odd mission in 40k to be used. So what would we replace it with? Well if you play a 5 objective mission you can always declare two of the objectives on each side as C&C as well as normal objective mission objectives. This would encompass the three old missions. Yet no matter which direction a style like this can go it can always be gamed. So what did my opponent think should be used?
Well he is for using book missions (heresy!). The problem everyone knows with that that book missions are even more unbalacnced in half of them. Yet if you do look close enough all of them but the relic and the scouring are not that bad as tournament missions. Even Big Gunz has its place with it being essentially multi objecitve. Almost all of the missions essentially have a multi objective theme which could equal the speration we need to avoid a clean win system. Yet issues exsist in many ways. For instance VP spreads could be too different depending on whether you faced the paladin or DE player during the Purge mission. Issues like these are prevelent and need a solution. Yet this is effectively a battle points tournament which have their own issues. The truth is 40j was not designed as a tournament game ands as the bso we will always need to shoe horn it into a format that suits are needs for the weekend. Yet I will state that IMHO a multi objective BP mission stands as my prefferred tournament format. So in conclusion RTT's, also in my oppinion, should be using book missions (except the scouring and the relic for obvious purposes) but GT's need to form their own format but make it hard to game. Maybe a little parody in the Nova could happen if they did not use the same three missions every round but developed a 6 mission system where only 3 are in play and they are randomly tossed together. Yet who knows what is best in these toddler days of 6th.....more on this later
Great article here.
ReplyDeleteI'm sad that I'm just now finding this a month later, and sad that it doesn't have more comments, 'cause I think this is an area that could really benefit from a lot more attention as we're still very much in the infancy of 6th.