Top-of-round scoring led to an unfun win (for opponents) and a loss on turn 2

Hi all,

I played a really fun 1000 point game with 3 others, where we teamed up in two teams of 500 points. It was friendly, close, hard fought. Top of turn 5, we thought we would quickly compare VPs to see if it mattered if the last surviving remnants of the khorne bloodletter bomb succeeded in their charge vs my kabalites, or if I and my ally were too far ahead. It didnt matter. Because rather than my opponents being close enough to catch us, they were actually 30 points ahead, and had been for ages. They were more shocked than we were, and it left a really bitter feeling in everyones mouths. One culprit was identified. Scoring primary VPs at the top of each players round. If one team, probably the team which goes second, gets pushed off a point, or has a point contested, and the other team is able not quite pushed off their point, thats it. Its game over. At least, it was for us.

So, a couple of disclaimers. This was my second game of 9th, and the first for my Tau game partner. Across from us was my AdMech friend (also his second game) and the khorne player (also first game). A few points to note:

1. I have lost to Tau and AdMech before in 8th, and AdMech in 9th, and I dont really mind the 8th losses at all. I am salty about my 2000 pt loss in 9th due to the shear rate of fire of bloody robots when locked down in melee, but eh, I am not a great player. I beat the Khorne player in 8th, when he fielded a Thousand Son army. These guys are really close friends and we all laugh about it and help each other out.
   
2. We played the forward advance mission or something like that. 4 points, one in each deployment zone, close to each deployment zone. Secondary is to action a troop unit and score if they still hold it at the start of the next round.
   
3. The point in our deployment zone was in tree cover, and is point 1. Point 2 was our closest and was behind some boxes from their point of view. Point 3 is their closest and behind boxes from our point of view. Point 4 was in tree cover in their deployment.
   
4. Not the best armies from any of us. I took Flayed Skull Archon (Djinn Blade/Blast Pistol), 2x5 Kabal with BP and B'er, Raider with Dissi, Razorwing with DL and cannon. Tau I am not totally familiar with but flying commander mech, markerlight guy, 3x5 breachers, big walking rocket mech with 2 drones, 10 Kroot. AdMech was 2 knights, 2x5 infantry, and a tech priest of some description. Khorne was a throne, 6 hounds, 1 hound character, 20 deepstriking bloodletters.
   
5. Tau and I had full CP. AdMech and Khorne prespent for deepstrike and some other thing that didnt actually matter. We all forgot CP regen, so no harm, no fowl there.
   
6. We chose attack on all fronts, thin their ranks, and we wernt sure about the third one, so took the mission secondary. They took attack on all fronts, the one where they have to kill more units than we do in a round, and assassinate. In hindsight, we should have gone for assassinate, but in the end, it accounted for a 3 point difference, not a 30 point difference.
   
7. We know Tau and DE wont fight together. We know AdMech and Khorne wont fight together. Let us have this!

Deployment was fairly standard and we all started fully in cover. We each had our home objectives (we held 1, they held 4). We won the roll and opted to play reactionary, as they couldnt really shoot us turn 1 (ok, they tried on the razorwing, but I was sure it would survive). We began the game. And although we didnt know it, half a turn later, when me and my friend got to do something, we had already lost...

Their turn 1, they advance, securing 3 with 5 infantry, and leaving 5 infantry on 4. They get line of sight on a few things and plug 1 damage into the razorwing, and blast some Kroot, halving the number on 1. Most importantly, they move up, making it very dangerous to try and knock them off of 4 or 3. Hold on, why is it not dangerous for them to attack 1? And what about 2? Well, remember, we havnt actually gone yet.

We do now though, and respond. I get lucky with DL and the razorwing takes out one knight (the knight near 2). Thats lucky, because the breachers, markerlight guy, flying battle suit HQ, and my Archon all run up and camp on 2. We knew we were going to get charged by the throne and the deepstriking bloodletters. We also knew For the Greater Good and my archon with Soulthirst and a Djinn blade were going to respond in a very nasty way. A neurotoxin goes off on point 4 and wiffs (yay! poison!), a splinter cannon stutters into point 3. My raider sticks itself right in the open and unloads through the trees onto point 4, but cant quite land the hits. Annoying, but they are about as damaged on 4 as we are on 1. Smart missiles from Mr Slow Walky Suit deal with half the hounds.

End of Round 1.

Start of Round 2.

They hold 2 points, we hold 2 points, they get 10 VP. Then they deepstrike, miss the charge on the bloodletters, fail to get to 2 with the throne, blast the Kroot off 1, stick the hounds on there, and graze the raider. And hey, now its our go.

So, we get... wait, hang on. We get 5? And they are likely to get 15 next turn (5 each for the points, +5 for holding the most, but capped at 15)? How? Oh, because it was not physically possible for us to contest their points in turn 1, and they have had 2 movements by now allowing them to contest or push us off our point. Damn, ok. Need to do some thinking. Tau thinks he can use battle suits to wipe out most of 3, I think I can take down the other wounded knight. Point 2 gets contested next turn, I could neurotoxin the bloodletters but really, I need to deal with 3 and 4. So unload one unit of kabalites and walk them into the forest towards 4. Fly over the forest with the raider and other kabalites and catch 4 in the crossfire. Accidentally overkill them (by 1 die) meaning I cant charge and cap or contest 4. Well, crap. Also deal nasty damage to 3. The Knight survives with 1 wound left. Silly knight. We couldnt quite get the hounds off 1.

End of round 2.

Start of round 3.

They hold... Damn it they hold 2 points to our 1. 15 VP for them I guess! And whats this? The tech priest comes into melee with my disembarked kabal to stop them getting close enough to grab the point. Sigh, ok. Bloodletters get the charge off, and the throne joins them. Blows are traded over 2, which is now contested. Surprisingly, I decimate the bloodletters after a few get shredded by For the Greater Good. Shame they all came back. But thats more bodies to kill for attrition. The breachers and the markerlight guy all die though.

Our turn and... we hold nothing, because for 2 rounds now we have been pushed off in their turn, and had to decided between pushing them off theirs in our turn, and recapturing our own. I mean, seriously, how were we supposed to do this? Fine, I unload the second kabal and they take 4, the other kabal actually kills the tech priest in the fight phase. Archon on 2 (alone now) somehow survives the bloodletters, dealing a bunch of damage to the throne, before finally dying. The last knight goes down. We blow them off 3 and put a battlesuit HQ there (but a misplace means that Khorn actually makes a charge next turn, not that it mattered).

Before we end round 3, lets just take stock. There are 2 battle suits and 2 drones left for tau. There are no admech. There is one badly wounded khorne hound HQ, a pack of 20 bloodletters (I keep cutting them down, they keep popping back up!), and a badly wounded throne. And I have lost a grand total of 1 HQ and 1 single kabalite. My vehicles are still in the top wound bracket. They hold 2, but we hold 3 and 4, and 1 is free. They are 20 points ahead. They go first. Stop and do the maths a second. We actually cant win at this point, though that might not be obvious. With total board control going into round 4, we cannot win from 20 points with round 5 still to play. Want to know how?

End of round 3

Start of round 4

They get 5 VP for 2, taking their primary lead to 25.

HQ hound eats drones. Throne stays on 2. Bloodletters JUST make a charge to contest 3 (our fault that one, I wont begrudge them that). They in fact just kill the HQ on 3 so they didnt need to contest.

They end their go.

Our turn. We score... 5 VP again. Great. That takes us back to a 20 VP tail.

I charge the throne, killing it with a shock prow, and giving me point 2. We cant reach point 1. I stay on point 4. I halve the model count of the bloodletters on 3. A handful of them come back and are set up in a congaline to span from point 3 to within charging distance of point 4.

Lets take a moment here. Remember, we, at this point, dont know the extreme VP difference. In fact, we all think that Tau and I are winning. We ahve been scoring secondaries and dominating board control and just look, there is a single unit of infantry left on their side and I am nearly full strength.

End of round 4.

Start of round 5.

We look to see if its even worth playing. They will score 5 VP, and have to make the charge (which they can do) to contest 4. Otherwise, we get both 4 and 2, and gain 15 VP. But we are already 25 VP down (including the 5 they will get from this round), which brings us to 10 less than them. And if they do make the charge, then we only get 5, leaving us 20 less than them. The fact that I can (if I survive the charge) then wipe them out completely DOES NOT MATTER. So no, its not worth playing. Thanks GW, best case scenario, we end a turn early, worst case scenario, they get half a turn more than we do, THEN we end the game early. Well, I guess that does make games faster!

We add up secondaries, and yeah, we should have taken assassination, as doing so would have put us even on secondary VP. But it was a points difference of 3, not 25.


Honestly, me and Tau are shellshocked by this, but AdMech almost flips the table. He has been watching a lot of 9th games online, and he HATES start of turn scoring. And he is right. Had BOTH teams scored either before they both went, or after they both went, or hell, at the end of the game, that would have been better. Even beter, why on earth are we not rolling off a the start of every round like in AoS?

As a thought experiment, we flipped the turns. Had everything else happened exactly as it did, with us going first and them going second, we would ahve lost narrowly on secondaries and the placement of that HQ battlesuit on 3. Had we flipped the order kept turn 1 the same, and then did some spitballing, we reckon we would have won by about, wait for it, 25 VP, as we would have got 10 turn 2, and then been able to focus on pushing them off 3 or 4 without worrying about having to retake 1 or 2. Then they would have struggled to catch up.

Look, its probably just that we are still thinking 8th in a 9th world, but we all felt pretty crappy about the game when we totalled up the points at the end. There were clutch moments, tactical sparks of brilliance and blunders of epic proportions. And none of it mattered because the first time we could score points, the enemy had had one extra turn of moment, shooting and fighting. And that was always the case.

This is how 9th edition will work, and requires some acclimation. I have won all three of my 9th games, but my opponents were stuck in 8th mentality and are starting to understand how the scoring works. The most extreme example was my third game. I only killed 120 points (deepstriking Eradicators) and had my 1000 point army tabled in turn 4, but had already won the game easily. I moved up Grotesques and Wracks onto objectives on turn 1, and my opponent (Deathwatch) decided to hold and shoot them all up on turns 2 and 3. It looked like a slaughter in his favor until I mentioned at the end of the third turn that, because he did not move his units onto objectives to score at the top of turn 4, it was impossible for him to win. Post-game discussion had me explain to him that he has to move his troops forward and charge my guys on objectives turn 2 or 3 in order to score points and deny mine, it just seems counterintuitive when his guys are equipped with long barreled rifles and mine have knives and clubs.

The problem with this is I had very little fun, standing still with Coven units making invulnerable saves all game. I knew, after his mistake not playing to the new edition, I had the victory, but that still meant I was wasting the next hour being target practice. Worst of all, we were playing our first Crusade game, which actually didn't reflect the game result at all. Two of my units received battle scars while his army racked up experience points for destroying lots of units. If you're playing a Crusade for the long haul, you want to kill lots of units and survive and actually winning the game isn't important at all.

And that is my point. All the fun bits of the game, the clutch moments, blowing up something much bigger with a last ditch effort, desperately trying to hold a point, blasting someone else off one, even eradicating the entirety of the enemy's models, NONE OF IT MATTERS. What matters is, apparently, whoever goes first and gets that extra half a turn advantage, or whoever has the stickiest units. Not the best. Just the stickiest. The game based on guns and speedy flyers and lasers and bombs and stuff boils down to two guardsmen in different types of camo, swinging at each other with wifflebats because it doesnt matter if the enemy completely wipes you out and moves on to the hive city you were defending, what matters is making sure you are stood on this spot at the start of every turn, and that your enemy is not.

And that isnt fun. Book keeping isnt fun. Winning by default isnt fun. Be honest, Oaka. When you got totally wiped out, did it really feel like you won? Because wiping out AdMech and Khorne felt like I won. They confirmed that watching me cut them to ribbons felt like losing. The points were useful in that if I had just slammed into their battle line, i would have died, but instead the points concentrated their (and my) attention. But way they are scored, the position it put us in, it ran counter to the flow of the battle. When we thought we were doing well, we were doing badly.

You know what we decided? 4 players. 4 dedicated players. Who have invested years into their armies. We decided "9th can go take a long walk of a short pier. Lets go back to (pre PA) 8th." Well done, GW, you made you game so streamlined, so not about complicated combat mechanics, that you just lost previously guaranteed 5 codex sales.

No, it wasn't fun, obviously. My point was that one player was playing 9th edition and the other was playing 8th. Once everyone gets on the same page I expect the games to be more entertaining. If my opponent wanted to win, he had to engage my units in melee, so it would have been more interactive for me. There was even a point when he asked if we should call it, and that was very awkward after I explained I was going to win. He had no idea the status of the game because he had done more of a skim of the new rules. I am keeping faith that once everyone adjusts to the new missions, the games will be much more back and forth.

If the game was a straight up slugfest, then Primaris would win every time with their damage output and survivability. The new emphasis on multiple objectives means you have to both be mobile and have multiple units, preferably with objective secured. I fully expect to win against Primaris only on technicality, and get absolutely blown off the board every game. Claim objectives on turns 2 and 3, and strategically die on turn 4. I don't think this will ever be fun, so I may only agree to play Xenos armies for the next six months or so, since my free time is important to me.

@albions-angel, each team was scoring at the begining of their player turn, not together at the start of the Battel Round? Just want to be clear on that, your OP seams to imply that you were both scoring together (which would have advantaged the second player a lot more).

This is simply the way that 9th is played. It is a biggest change to the mission structure we have had since ITC started their own mission pack a few editions ago.

Rather than focusing on brawling it out, the new missions are heavily skewed to objective holding. As a DE player, you have the speed OR the toughness to do this (but not both unless you combine Kabal/Cult/Coven).

I would recomend keeping score throughout the match, so that you know how to play your turn. Simply going into berserker "kill everything" mode no longer works, you need to be tactical. This is especially true for finess armies like DE and Tau.

For my $0.02, try to play a few more games. The new missions will "Click" and it will make more sense. The first few missions of 9th I played really turned things on their heads for me.

We were each scoring at the start of our turns, not all together at the top of the battle round.

Thing is, while scoring at the top of the round might favour the second player, scoring at the top of each players turn, but precluding VP scoring on turn 1 even more heavily favours the first player, as they get an entire extra turn before the second player gets a chance to score/respond.

I get that its about objectives now, but its not like I flew into the jaws of defeat this time. I was trying to remove them from objectives and take out threats that would remove us, but because we went second, and they got that all important second move/shoot/charge/fight before we did, we were automatically playing catch up. So our decision went from "Big threats or objective capture or both" to "Big threats or objective capture OR RECAPTURE OF OUR POINTS BUT WE ALREADY DIDNT GET VP FOR THEM or ALL THREE"

Had we gone first, it would have been reversed. Both sides would have weakened the other on round 1, then we would have scored our VP and removed them from their objectives before they got a chance to score. Just as they did to us.

Had we both scored at the end of the round (or the start, it matters not) then yes, the second player is favoured because they can recap points, but the first player also gets to blast them off points and dig in before the second player goes. As it stands, the first player just needs to remove point control at the start of round 2 to get an automatic score advantage. They dont need to actually cap those points... ever...

And, call me crazy, but I thought the entire point of the game WAS to shoot each other to pieces (or slash each other, whatever floats your gunboat). But time and time again, on here, on reddit, on stream, I am hearing "Oh yeah, we can totally win, its just a new way of playing. What you have to do is get early VP advantage and then get tabled on turn 3, but thats ok, because they get nothing for that!"

I mean, correct me if I am wrong, but if we win by ignoring the enemy exists, and presumably they win by ignoring we exist, should we not just set up 2 identical battlefields side by side only play the movement phases on our own tables?

Ok, lets leave when scoring happens alone for now. We trailed by 30 points, despite similar secondary points. 25 of those points were from primary objectives alone. Never did the other team control more than 2 objectives at once, but they got that extra half a round to ensure we didnt control more than 1 at any given point.... right until I tabled them in turn 4 and was free to collect them all. Except, we score at the start of the round, so literally what is the point of turn 5? Apparently, secondaries just arnt that important.

Maybe if primaries were worth less? We were trying to hold on to them AND remove the other team from theirs, but they had already scored! If they were worth less, the difference in points would have been much, much smaller and we could have, with our more finesse based armies, focused on ceeding the objectives in favour of more efficient secondaries. That would even fit better with DE lore (less so Tau, though frankly why they dont just glass a planet from orbit I dont know).

This is less a thread of "We didnt know what we were doing" and more a thread of "even the victors think it was dumb". Guess I want more war in my miniature wargame.

I thought you start scoring from the second battle round? So both players would get a turn before you start scoring? Might need to check the book again though

i'm totally new to this game, with only two games of experience in the last month.
I gotta say that the game is actually fun.....until i figured out everything you are saying here......i thought it was a Wargame and not a Catch-me-if-you-can game.
I do get it that with the objectives, strategy becomes the key factor for victory instead of just building the best list possible and smash everything to smitherens.
I do get it that an all out war is not the best thing either, as it will only be a slugfest for dummies.
Its ok that the objectives are the most important thing in the game, but it become really sad when you can't even defend yourself properly against anything that is now 9th edition power level.
I mean, both games i've played, while i was running around everything was fine, but as soon as my opponent can have a line of sight on my models, they start falling like flies! I'm not playing hide and seek goddamn! And when i signed in for DE, i knew i was playing glass canons......but now we don't even have the canon! only the glass......sad!


I left Magic the Gathering after 20 years of play (good news is that embarking on Warhammer did not cost a lot after a massive trade i've made) because this game now sucks! For those who know a little the game, even in standard (supposed to be the weakest format of all) the games were now done by turn 3! an absolute nonsense all due to a power creep Wizards of the Coast created.
My fear is that the same thing will happens to Warhammer, where everything is always bigger and better than the last.
i know that a not-so-good model will probably not sell at all, but this thinking can lead us somewhere we dont want to go!

Sarcron wrote:

I thought you start scoring from the second battle round? So both players would get a turn before you start scoring? Might need to check the book again though

You are correct. (at least each mission i played the primaries can only be scored starting in turn 2).

I suspect part of the reason for that is to avoid the who goes first wins scenario.

The other thing I've learned in the first two games of 9th I've played, is that contesting objectives is almost as valuable as holding.

So if you hold 2 and your opponent holds 2. You just need to contest one of those that he is on, and you suddenly hold more. Or if he has 3 and you only have 2, then contesting one of his at least denies hold more to him.

@albions-angel, you are totally entitled to your feelings on this. Maybe you want to try out 8th edition with the score cards, or 8th edition ITC format? The ITC heavily favored "kill stuff" type of missions.

If your gaming group isnt having fun, then change things up a little.

IMHO, 9th seems to be more fun, especially for us DE (who struggled Killing stuff in 8th). We have a lot of fast/tough units that more than pull their weight. Try out some Coven stuff during your next game. I usualy take 3 squads of Wracks, and so far there is always 1 squad that takes AMAZING amounts of enemy firepower while I laugh maniacally

But you really need to keep track of your VPs, or you wont know how to play your turn. The game now revolves around holding those Objectives, contesting enemy Objectives, killing enemies off of Objectives, or killing enemies so you can get Objectives

The rules for 9th edition are really really fun (my opinion).
I mean, almost everything is clear, fun and relatively easy to understand.
My only complaint about the game right now is the unbalanced situation GW create with every new Codex.
Use the same mechanic that 9th edition wants us to use (play for the objectives and not for destroying the enemy army) but within a perfectly (or near) balanced environments, and i'm pretty sure EVERYONE will have a blast of fun, no matter the chosen faction (now for sure, a weak list will always be a weak list, no matter what).
So don't blame the 9th edition, blame the way that GW releases their codexes.

I don't know if you guys recall when 8th ed. first came out, it was the same thing. If you were playing an index army, you would get destroyed by a codex army.

I lost pretty much every game i played with DE with the Index (or at list disproportionately more losses than wins)

Once our codex came out, I rarely lost again. (note, i didn't have many regular marine players in my meta, so certainly i expect i would have lost regularly to iron hands etc. later in 8th ed).

So we're in a similar boat now. I expect we will struggle (at least against marines and necrons) until our codex comes out.

Codex Power Creep has been around for as long as I have been playing (3ed edition). This is not new to veterans out there.

In fact, it has gotten a lot better. We used to go whole editions without a Codex, while Marines were constantly getting Power Creep updates.

Anyone remember DE in 4th edition? XD

When 8th came out and everyone got Index'ed, it was beyond amazing. Even 9th's heavy handed point reballancing seems to be quite healthy for the game. Just remember that we are the Bad Guys, we are not supposed to win

Codex creep was insane in 2nd edition too. The Spaces wolves, Blood Angels, Orks all had their moments of utter OPness one after the other. That's not to say that 2nd was not fun, it really was if you bought into the "comic-style" hyperbole it created...but yeah, balanced it was not and after some time it created a need for something more so

That said, i am returning to 40k because my wife is into adepta sororitas and i once had a wych cult which i decided to renew. I was hoping 9th would be more balanced at the start though. Seems we have to survive a rain of marine stuff.