40k Championship Primer missions (tournament results)

[Janthkin]

Hey guys,

I ran a little 16-slot tournament this past weekend (1500 pts, 2 hour rounds) using the Primer missions, in the hopes of determining a single "winner." It didn't quite work out, and I thought I'd share both the results and a little player feedback:

Of the 8 games per round:
Mission 1: 8 w/l results
Mission 2: 5 w/l results, 3 ties
Mission 3: 6 w/l results, 2 ties
Mission 4: 8 w/l results

Of the 16 players, 10 experienced 1 tie game; no one experienced 2 or more. Of the 8 players who won their round 1 game, all 8 experienced a tie in rounds 2 or 3. None of the ties were time-limited results; all of them went to the game's natural conclusion.

The only mission that drew negative feedback was Mission 4 - about half of the players thought it was a little too complicated (most, but not all, of those had not read the missions before the event).

I have additional data about how many of the mission "goals" each player completed, if you're interested. Mission 4 had 2 of the 8 games end up in VP tie-breakers, with wins by 205 and 200 VPs, which was darn close to a tie.

[Matthias]

Great data. Many thanks.

The AdeptiCon 40K Championships rules really don't work in determining a true winner in a single event format.

You sort of need the qualifiers and finals format with wildcards in order for it to function properly.

That said, if you were to remove the Draw conditions from the missions entirely and make the VP tiebreak the definitive W/L determination - it would work, I just feel that games of this nature miss some of the subtleties of wargaming (both from the 'war' and 'game' angles).

Otherwise you could go off a straight W/L/D record using something else like total objectives achieved or raw VP form game to game to differentiate between identical records.

Your tie percentage of 15-16% is a bit higher than what I have seen in other primers (usually more like 10%), but not all that unexpected. Having two criteria for a game to result in a true tie (while only having one to determine wins/losses), has limited ties/draws but not totally eradicated them, which was the intention of the new format.

What specifically did players find confusing about Mission 4? Too much objective interaction? It is technically the mission with least amount of goals in play, it just requires you to mentally split the objectives on the table into two separate missions. This is honestly the Epic GT mission in a modified format (and much simpler).

[Janthkin]

Your tie percentage of 15-16% is a bit higher than what I have seen in other primers (usually more like 10%), but not all that unexpected. Having two criteria for a game to result in a true tie (while only having one to determine wins/losses), has limited ties/draws but not totally eradicated them, which was the intention of the new format.

The part that really surprised me wasn't the overall number of ties, but the spike in round 2 - 3/8 of the games tied, which seemed high.

One other note on mission #2: the Dark Angels player had a remarkably easy win (4 scoring Terminator units w/cyclone MLs & TH/SS, only 2 non-Troops kill points available in the entire army, in the form of Belial and Sammael). Also, some people were dismayed at the end to realize that Troop transports didn't give up KPs.

What specifically did players find confusing about Mission 4? Too much objective interaction? It is technically the mission with least amount of goals in play, it just requires you to mentally split the objectives on the table into two separate missions. This is honestly the Epic GT mission in a modified format (and much simpler).

I think a large problem was that it was the fourth round of the day, and people were getting tired. Coupled with the need to do mental math throughout, to keep track of how likely you were to get the VP goal, and some players were getting a little worn down.

For myself, I like the mission design behind #4, though I think I would prefer it in a non-DoW game; foot armies have quite a bit of walking to do to get to the opponent's half of the board, even if their player was savvy enough to put his two markers on the middle line (and his opponent wasn't savvy enough to stop him with their own objective placements).