Clash of the Titans report

The army lists on display here were, as is typical for a tournament attended by a tight knit gaming group, were “different”. I’d say 50% of the field was probably balanced or tuned lists and the other 50% were scissors paper rock armies.

Some feedback on the tourney: Positives, now these far outweighed the negatives: Played in excellent spirits, great to see so many young WHFB guys play in the open rather than the junior. Clearly the CTA guys are doing a great job of encouraging young fantasy players. Quality of game play was actually well above what I expected.

The negatives were firstly that transparency was very low I still don’t know how the sports and comp scoring actually worked including what mark I gave my opponents? I’d normally expect to know what the score I gave was. The scenarios, okay capture the flag and kill the general, a couple of hundred points at most here and there is fine, it skews the game a little but not disastrously so. The take and hold style scenario was in my view an utter diaster that completely destroys any balance in the game,.

Army List
My list was very similar to the list for dog con minus the useless unit of marauders.

Characters:
Level 4 MOT – collar of khorne, enchanted shield, black tounge, demon steed
BSB MOT – favour of the gods, armour of damnation
Lvl 2 MOT – puppet

Core
2 x 5 hounds
2 x 5 marauder horsemen with shield flails and MOS
20 Marauders – MOT LA/SHLD

Special
2 x 6 Knights – MON, one with War banner other banner of wrath

Rare:
Warshrine (mos)
Hellcannon

Game 1: Louis Samuels (Dwarfs)

First game up against an unknown young guy with dwarves. Great a 15-5 at worst and a good start to the tourney unfortunately it became the old age lesson of never underestimate your opponent.

Louis had a moderate dwarf army with 2 bolties, a cannon, a unit of thunderers, 2 units of quarrellers, a unit of hammerers, a unit of clansmen, 2 rune smiths, 2 units of ogres, a BSB and a lord. Magic items were heavily weighted towards defence.

Louis made only one mistake in deployment putting a unit of thunderers, with rune smith on the extreme flank that best case could only claim a unit of horsemen. His placement of artillery thought was perfect, aligning them so there was no way for me not to offer a flank on both of my knights when I pushed forward.

I on the other hand screwed my deployment and first turn something fierce. I didn’t screen the flanks of my knights from the bolties (idiot) and for some reason spent a runt dicking around rather than pressing forward. That one turn cost me my knights and saved his clansmen (with rune smith) from a 6 knight + BSB charge (all with +1 attack from the shrine).

In the end his shooting took care of the knights and the hell cannon (well his engineer in combat killed the hell cannon but hey...)

End result: 8-12 loss and me left wondering about my case of muppetitis.

Game 2: Joel Espinosa High Elves

Joel is a former club mate of mine but we had only really played once, thanks to my sporadic attendance, in that game Joel made a couple of deployment errors that cost him.

In this one he had a rock hard He army with the obligatory two units of sword masters, dragon princes, 2 mages, phoenix guard, two min units of sea guard, 2 eagles, 2 bolties and of course the obligatory lord on star dragon (seriously they should rename it COTD clash of the dragons).

Game was kind of decided turn 2 when Joel brought his star dragon and lord out from behind cover hoping to get him in combat ASAP to stop gateways being opened up left right and centre. So I got one turn to shoot at it with the Hell cannon, after a perfect guess the cannon hit killing the lord.

Next turn he threw the dragon into the flank of my unit of knights which had the Stubborn 4+ ward gift bestowed on it by the warshirne along with banner, BSB, warbanner. Knowing he would otherwise lose combat he threw the phoenix guard into the front of the same unit. Over the course of the next 4 turns it went back and forth him beating me, me passing the stubborn, me beating him, him holding until eventually both units broke. I didn’t get the dragon but got half points.

Across the rest of the battlefield my magic held sway (after black tongue killed his best wizard), still Joel was able to eventually shoot down my knights and do enough to keep the result close.

Result: 13-7 (21/40 points)

Game 3: Tom Goldie (Wood Elves)

Tom had a relatively typical wood elf army – 2 units of war dancers, a treeman, an eagle, wild riders, 5 units of dryads, 2 units of archers, warhawk riders, a bsb, 2 mages and a branch wraith.

I kind of knew what was going to be the problem for tom his screening units of drayds couldn’t stand up to my knights and his archers weren’t going to be able to punch through them.

Tom made the mistake of firing at my knights first turn which gave my marauder horse one turn of not being fired at and allowed them to charge one unit and kill it, whilst the knights took care of the other. The BSB’s unit (with +1 attack) ploughed through the dryads and over ran into the treeman, he made the Ferris error of throwing the wardancers into the knights and ended up losing his flank as a result.

He had a massive combat in the middle where the dryads hit my marauders front whilst an eagle and warhawks hit the rear. He won the first turn by one, I held and then broke them the two turns later. After that it was a bit of mop up. Tom had taken enough off me to prevent the 20-0 though.

Result: 19-1



Game 4: Chris Ball (VC)

I had a bit of a spit before this game when I found out that the game was decided only by table quarters nothing else (the players pack I read on the net was, lets say, light on for detail and as such did not talk about this hence a rude shock that we would play a 40k scenario at a WHFB tournament).

I was playing against a VC army with 9 pd and a dragon, essentially without copious amounts of luck, a great game by me and a few errors from Chris the best I should be able to do was a draw given that he can raise units in every quarter and is unbreakable.

To me this scenario had no place in WHFB it is a 40k scenario that just straight up does not work in WHFB. It was far and away in my top 2 worst scenarios I’ve ever played. [side note: the other being where the centre of the battlefield had a mystical crevasse and when you went near it you had to roll on a table and anything could happen to you from being attacked by 4 vampires to auto destroying all units with 2D6 inches that was tops.]

Chris had a lord on dragon, two other vamps, one with +1 level, 1 a BSB, 2 units of zombies, a unit of skellies, a unit of black knights, one large unit of wolves, wraiths, varghulf and some bats.

The game basically went:

Step 1: got some good luck Chris’s dragon went stupid two turns in a row so couldn’t cast and I rolled up two pandemoniums for spells which meant he kept miscasting and I kept altering his miscasts to get rid of his best spells and magic levels. With me holding sway over magic it was tough for Chris.
Step 2: Chris made a mistake of drawing the battle line inside his two table quarters allowing me to meet him there and control all 5 (there was an objective in the centre that counted as a “quarter”) when he should instead pushed to get across the middle and force me to fight my way into his half. He probably did this because at the start of the game he had a bazillion options for getting each quarter that the strategy wasn’t needed
Step 3: Fired up by the stupid scenario, plus being hangover free, I played tactically my best game of the weekend coming up with a plan and executing it perfectly

End result: 15-5 (55/75)

Game 5: Darren Donaldson (Khorne warriors)

Darren had an uber combat army with 4 units of Khorne knights (eep), 3 or 4 units of dogs for screening, 2 units of khornate marauders with great weapons, a unit of khornate warriors with GW, 2 level 1s with 4 scrolls and a lord on jugger with the demon sword and some ridiculous negative on his save.

On an open table he would have been able to hem me in and control the game but our table had a diagonal river through it splitting it in two and on one side a Forrest splitting it into three.

I deployed the fast cav on the open side of the river knowing they had the move to redeploy across if he weighted that flank, and kept the knights close by with the hope of neutralising one unit of knights on the far side of the forest and hopefully redirecting and punching through the other three with my diverters and two units of knights.

The game went pretty much to plan Darren made two rules based errors that essentially cost him the game:

1. one with where my chargers were going to end up after his hounds fled. He thought they go straight ahead not centre to centre following the hounds, this meant that instead of my unit being in no-mans land it hit the flank of one unit of knights carved it and then over ran into the flank of his marauder block supporting the two units of knights over the river. Which allowed my BSB’s unit to charge another unit knights and pursue them into the unit behind. This was pretty much the game.

2. the other mistake, though less costly, was he brought up the general in a unit of hounds but positioned him so I could avoid him with the hell cannon (as the dwarfs can’t reach they go to the back) meaning I broke him and at least got rid of his frenzy and immunity to psychology and many panic tests ensued (though none failed).

Taking those units out meant I could focus all of my magic on his one remaining unit of knights that was bottled up behind the forest eventually whittling them down to two and forcing them to charge my generals bunker.

End result: 20-0 (75/95)

Well second tournament with these guys so have to be happy to pull in a second place behind the immortal Jeff Traish. I must admit I’m enjoying having tactical options after the beastmen and the O&G generally being forced to concede certain elements of the game.

Breakdown
Things I did wrong over the weekend that I and hopefully others may learn from.

- Kept forgetting my bound spell and using that at the end, rather than trying to drag dice with it at the start. Rookie error.
- Have to think of blot throwers as a ranked up unit when in my flank, never present the knights flank to the bolties; or
- Screen the freaking flanks of the knights for Christ’s sake Brad (seriously how many shots to my flank will it take before I learn)
- black tongue was nice but I could think of more effective uses of the 50 points.
- Hellcannon is over rated and I was still uncertain how to use him. However my opponents very much over rate it which gives it a fear factor (that ironically by writing this I’m helping to dispel – so ignore that point)
- Marauder horsemen are shite with flails, may as well throw some axes on them.

Baby with the bathwater?

So here we stand at the window with our baby bath full of dirty tiered composition water and question do we just chuck it out the window? So I think it maybe time to consider checking if it is absolutely necessary for the panel comp baby to take the four story drop with the second hand suds?

Now on the tier comp side I think it was a worthwhile experiment half bringing the objective and subjective comp guys together. [side note: We kind of already knew it wouldn’t work at dogcon given it didn’t work at masters, but despite this its failure at DC seemed to catch people off guard. I personally went in expecting a 6 point range]

There were several problems and many can be argued over and over from both sides but the central problem I think is it combined the “non-core” attributes of both the objective and subjective approaches.

From an objective system stand point it didn’t take into account what was in the army just what book and from a subjective view it constrained the reviewer and prevented them from assessing the army against the rest of the field.

Now the first question I have from here is can it be salvaged or is the combination a fatal flaw. I think it may be possible to get the train back on track.

Some potential changes that I think may give both more freedom and direction and hence better results:

- The tiers need to not be hard tiers that appear to cap and floor an army’s score. Rather I’d prefer to see what score we expect the average army for any book to achieve. Don’t then have a restriction on the pluses and minuses just say score this army out of 5, 7, 10 or what ever keeping in mind average army for this type is (for example) a 2 out of 5. This way the panel can mark not only in regards to that army book but also against the field as a whole.

- We need for each book a sample “average” list for each tourney. Happy to admit I WAS WRONG in opposing this earlier. I have finally come round to this after being an opponent of it as I thought people would try and loophole the standard list or take something different and cry like roger federer when they get a comp hit “what do you mean my regenerating grave guard bunker is significantly harder than the two units of zombies in the standard list? Lets have a 37 page thread on how unfairly I was treated”. But heres the thing people will cry over those four or five points either way, so if clarity will produce more consistent results and make people feel more aware of their score I’m all for it.

With those two changes I think we get a system that is more flexible and consistent. The flexibility, I believe, is the most important thing. Speaking from professional experience, as soon as you overlay multiple static rule sets you can loophole them.

[side note: it is interesting that people can consider that objective comp will eventually be the answer when if you say look at another system of overlaid complex rules tax and ask how have governments around the world started to cut down on tax structuring and arbitrage? By putting place subjective tests because people consistently found the new loopholes with every change in the traditional objective tests. But hey I’m sure we are better at designing an objective system to overlay than every tax lawyer engaged by the governments around the world who only live and breath those systems and specialised in them academically.]

But the next question is: are tiered and panel comp inextricably linked? Can you only have one if you have the other? This appears to be the argument conveniently being pressed home with vim and vigour by the formula composition guys. [Side note: I was taught this as a negotiation technique: link two elements together then argue against one and effectively get them both conceded.]

I personally thought panel comp was working pretty well prior to the introduction of the tiers and that whilst there was the occasional outlier whose results weren’t justified but we sure abandoned the approach very early given how well it seemed to go. Sure army bias was exaggerated but I think tiering in conjunction with it only compounded that bias.

One other thing I would like to encourage is for panel members to look through their results and test to see if the “average” they’ve given for each race is appropriate. Any panel I’m a member of I do this and if I vary too much for one race or seem to be displaying bias I look through again and try to form arguments against my initial feelings. This isn’t to say that I always change them just that if I’m not giving an average mark for the race then I want to be certain it isn’t because I’ve misread the “hardness” of the tournament or because of unreasonable bias.

So I guess what I’m suggesting for the way forward is, for at least larger tourneys, revert to straight panel composition, preferably with the guidance for average scores for each army provided.

The next few months will be an interesting time in Australian warhammer, I get the feeling that the ETC (a system that I actually agree with in the environment it is intended for – a battle points only tourney bringing many different tourney scenes together) is being used to shoe horn comp formulas into Australian tourneys which will be primarily for the benefit of the elite players.