6/4/2011 Team Tournament

The team team tournament I ran on Saturday wen off pretty well except for the poor turnout.  We had 4 teams of 4 show up, and fun seemed to be had by all.  Steve's team from Saltire Games won first place.  They beat out Spag's G2D4 team by one point.  I ran the tournament BP style even though I'm a big time w/l evangelist.  I felt since one pair of a team could win and another lose, there was no good way to avoid the tie situation.  This lead to the winning team taking first place even though they where technically beat by the second place team in the first round.  I still think this is a fair situation since every team played every team, and the result came down to Steve's team scoring 6 points against the team that Spag's team only scored 5 against.  It's not a situation where Steve's team only played easy opponents, and Spag's team played only hard ones.

I was disappointed about the low turnout.  We just barley made 4 teams thanks to the second G2D4 team needing to be rebuilt the day before.  There are a few things that I think effected the turnout for this tournament.

Getting yourself to a tournament is easy; getting 4 people to a tournament is hard.  
There are occasionally people who drop out of tournaments at the last minute.  It's difficult to get a team together full of people who you are relatively sure will make it.  Even then emergencies happen and one player has to back out and take his whole team with him.

Advertise, Advertise, Advertise
I thought that we would have no problem getting 6 to 8 teams together from the local hard-core tournament population.  Unfortunately a good group of them couldn't attend, and I did put out advertisement to catch guys from a larger radius. 

The Uber-Team
Word got out that the players that win most of the local tournaments where forming a super-team to compete.  This may have put some people off of the tournament.

A bad case of GW-itis
GW went off and did their usual thing.  You know how I feel about the about the recent GW news(though it looks like there may be some real quality issues with Finecast; hopefully they're just early production problems that will get cleared up in a few months), but I don't doubt that a few local where put off enough by the news to shelve their armies for a few weeks.


If anyone has any comments or criticisms about the format or the way I ran the event, please let me know so that I can address them the next time I run a tournament.

June 4th 4x4 Team Tournament Format

Here are the complete rules for the upcoming Hivefleet Indy 4x4 tournament.

Start Time: 10am  


Number of Rounds: 3


Game Length: 2 hours 30 minutes with a 45 minute break after the first round and a 15 minute break after the second.

Max 8 teams=32 players (4 teams pre-set: G2D4team 1, GP North team 1, GP South team 1, Saltire/Bradford team 1) The 4 remaining teams are first come first serve.


Entry per team. $45

Tournament Organizer: Greg / Caulyn Darr

Rules:

*Teams: 4 players with a 1,000 point list that follows all FOC requirements and current Codex restrictions. (Only 1 unique character per 4 man team){No 4 Calgar's, or 2 Njal's, or 3 Straken's, etc.)
*Codex special abilities that effect any friendly units do not effect teammate's units.
*Codex special abilities that effect enemy units can effect both enemy players' units.
*Codex special abilities that effect enemy and friendly units can effect all units in the game. 
*Team Captain will determine team pairings before each round, but before pairings of opponents are decided. 


Missions:


Each team will be paired with another each round and play two simultaneous games.  Each game will be comprised of two team members facing two opposing team members.  The team will claim one point for each mission objective claimed in either game with the winning team being the one that claimed the most points.  An equal number of objectives claimed will result in a tie.


Each mission will be comprised of three separate mission objectives.  One mission objective will be a team goal that either player can assist in claiming.  Each teammate will then select one of the personal objectives, and only they will be able to claim it in the game.  No two teammates in the same game may select the same personal objective.


Mission Objective 1: Objectives.  Five objectives are placed on the board; one in the center and one  in the center of each table quarter.  Objectives follow the rules in the 40K rulebook.  


Mission Objective 2: Table Quarters.   The team or player with the most claimed table quarters at the end of the game wins this objective. Whoever has the most Victory Points in a table quarter claims that quarter.  Scoring units count as an extra 100VP for claiming a table quarter.   If a unit is in more than one quarter, then they count as being in the quarter that contains the majority of the unit.


Mission Objective 3: Kill Points.  Kill points are scored as described in the 40K rule book.  In order to win this objectives the team or player must score 3 more KP than his opponent team or player.  When this is a personal objective, a player may claim kill points by destroying either opposing player's units, but units killed by his teammate do not count.


Each game will go for 6 turns with a 7th turn played on a 4+ die roll.


Each time a player claims  a personal objective type for the first time they score an additional point for their team.   Each player can score 3 bonus points, for a total of 12 possible for the whole team provided they claim all three types of objectives as a personal objectives.   For example if a player claims mission objective 1 in the first game, 2 in the second game, and 1 again in the first game, he would score 2 bonus points for is team.  These bonus points will be used as a tiebreaker for teams with identical w/l records.


The objectives for each round are:
Round 1:
Team objective: Kill Points
Personal objectives: Table Quarters, Objectives


Round 2:
Team objective: Table Quarters
Personal objectives: Kill Points, Objectives


Round 3:
Team objective: Objectives
Personal objectives: Table Quarters, Kill Points


Prize Support:
Pending...

A Viper, a Viper, My Kingdom for a Viper

G2D4's 1750 tournament is coming up, and I want to play my Eldar. Problem is my Eldar is a 1500 point force. My original 1750 point expansion plan was to upgrade my Autarch to Yriel and add a few Vypers. Unfortunately, nobody close by has any Vipers in stock and I won't be able to get any in in time to get them built and painted. It's what I get for focusing on my Firestorm Fleets and my WIP Tau for the last few months.

I'm going to have to pick something from the Eldar B team that I can get painted up in time. I have no spare transports, so Fire Dragons, Dire Avengers, and Storm Guardians are out. No jet bikes, so none of those. Ranger/Pathfinders are too expensive to put in enough to be a threat. My Heavy slots are all filled. Everything else besides Striking Scorpions suck too much to mention, so I'll be running Scorpions. Five Scorpions plus Exarch with Biting Blade and Shadow Strike, fits well into the 140 points I had slotted out for the two Vipers.

It's a sub optimal choice, but I own the models already. I can also get them painted up to match my army pretty quickly. I hate running 6 foot models in a all mech list. I can at least use them as first turn bubble wrap or semi-survivable objective holders.

Everybody seems to be getting on the 40k blog rolls, maybe I should do that...

More Play Testing

I want to do some more play testing this Saturday at G2D4 if anyone is interested. I want to see how the flyer rules work in action.

Always in a Rush

Our 40k club at G2D4 has another tournament coming up on Aug 7 (Yes, they know that's during GENCON). No particular information is available yet, but the TO should be making that available soon. I'm pretty sure it will be 1750 with three games.

A friend of mine I haven't seen in a few years was going to be at Gencon, so I'm torn about going to this tournament. I would probably have more fun for less cash at the tournament, so I'll probably skip the con on Saturday. I might take Friday off work and go then.

I am faced with having to get more stuff painted for my Eldar. It's my prettiest army, so I want to use it over just running my marines. I have a few options for filling in the last 250 points. I kind of want to convert a seer council on bikes, but I'll be lucky to get that done in a month. I'll probably add two or three Vipers. I'm also thinking about upgrading my Autaurch to a counts as Yriel. He's not the greatest special character, but his b-bomb attack would have been very useful in my last tournament. Converting up some Fire Dragon Exarchs is also a possibility.

I still plan on trying to write up my DV aircraft rules tonight. I won't be able to do any play testing on Saturday as I had hoped. I'm scheduled to play some other games, and it's board game night at work.

May 1st Tournament Highlights

I took 4th place in the G2D4 tournament last Saturday. I won my first game against Dark Eldar. Lost my second game against Scott's Salamanders, and won my third game against Black Templars. I had some horrid dice rolling in the second game. My speeders failed to kill a Land Raider at point blank range two turns in a row, and I failed 3 out of 7 2+ Terminator saves.

I like how my army performed overall. I think I need to find a way to fit in two more land speeders. If I loose the Predator and find 50 more points I can do it. It's either that or take them out of the list completely. They just offer up to much utility to do that. It may be worth it to just swap out the Predator 1 for 1 with another speeder.

I had fun. It's been a while since I left a tournament wanting to play more 40k instead of wanting to toss my army into a dumpster.

Here are some picks from the tournament:

Vehicles and Area Terrain

We all know the rule that vehicles need 50% concealment to gain the benefits of cover. The G2D4 and the Game Preserve players have two different ways of interpreting this rule. I just wanted to go into the reasoning why at G2D4 we play it the way we do.

At G2d4 we play that any vehicle at least 50% into the bases of area terrain defined as forests are granted cover, and that shooting though that base grants cover to vehicles on the other side. This is opposed to the GP way that requires that 50% of the vehicle is blocked by the physical models of the trees. TLOS and the strict reading of the rules would seem to back up the GP guys, but it really comes down to how you define the piece of terrain.

If you define the base as chest high foliage with a few static trees, then, yes I'd agree with the TLOS interpretation. If you define the base as being completely covered in trees similar to those placed on the base, then the G2D4 interpretation makes more sense.

It's impractical from a gaming standpoint to model forest as we play them to work in TLOS fashion. You have a hard time placing models in terrain modeled in such a way. Instead you use the base with trees on it that indicate the type of terrain, and you can move the trees around to better allow for placing of models without effecting the cover that the terrain generates. Essentially we're saying that the terrain is a lot more interesting looking than how we've represented it on the table top. This is done for the gaming reasons above, and due to the wear an tear such a terrain piece would take for normal play. Plus its cheap and easy to put two Woodland Scenic trees on a piece of felt and call it a lush dense forest.

If you play it the GP way, I think a forest piece needs to have at least 4 or 5 trees on it and you cannot move the placement of the trees at all during the game. Also, the stump should be treated as impassible so you cannot park any models on top of the trees.

For the G2D4 way you just put 1-2 trees on the base and move them around when they become inconvenient. I think it's a lot simpler to play it this way. You have a lot less stooping down to model level and arguing about if 50% is really covered.

I don't think the G2D4 way violates the rulebook either as the effects of terrain are agreed upon by the two players.

I do think that the way it should be played should be agreed beforehand. Regulars at a particular store tend to just accept the way terrain is played by convention, and you need to make sure things are clear when you play a new face. For instance the few times I've played pickup games at a GP store, regulars liked to claim cover saves for infantry when standing on those Aquila Lander pieces from the 4e starter box. At G2D4 we tend to play them as difficult terrain that only grants cover to something behind but not on top of. I like to go off the convention of: 'Your store, your rules.' At least for the first few games until people get to know me and I can make an argument and not seem like a know-it-all outsider.