Chapter Tactics is a 40k podcast which focuses on promoting better tactical play and situational awareness across all variations of the game. Today PeteyPab covers the results of a tournament whose top 5 players had an average of 556.64 ITC points each! He also brings on two top 10 players in the ITC to argue why their super faction is in fact the best 40k faction in 8th edition.
Show Notes:
- Interested in winning the Goldensprue Cup? You can find all the details here. Also don’t forget to check out Adam’s podcast The Masters of the Forge
- Click here for a link for information on downloading best coast pairings app where you can find lists for most of the events I mentioned.
- Chapter Tactics is back! With Weekly episodes and a lot of tactical insight, this is your place for all things 40k in 8th edition.
- Check out the last episode of Chapter Tactics here. Or, click here for a link to a full archive of all of my episodes.
- Want more tactical information about the new edition? Check out our 8th Edition article archive to help get a leg up on the competition!
Need help with a list idea? Got a rules question? Want to talk tactics? Then email me at…
frontlinegamingpeteypab@gmail.com
Please do not send an army list in a format such as Army Builder, send them in an easy to read, typed format. Thanks!
Imperium, Chaos, Eldar, Nids being the top factions is an easy call to make given that 3 of those are soups, and the only other factions are the codexless Tau, Orks, and Necrons.
Well, remember I was basing that decision off the Gt results, to be fair those are premature predictions anyways. Blood Angels and Dark Angels are around the corner, and we have no idea what a true post-CA meta looks like.
Yeah, soup lists are really hard to compete against for Xenos. It’s just the huge number of options. Filling out brigades is much easier when you have many codexes to draw from. It’s no surprise they win most tournaments.
The Tyranid Codex had to be extra strong to compete, and does so wonderfully. I hope orks, Necrons, and Tau do as well. If not, hopefully there will be a “one source/codex per detachment” rule.
IMHO soup lists are the biggest problem in 40k currently, easily worse (again IMHO) than allies ever were in 6th and 7th.
I have to agree
Bingo
Yeah, it’s a bit lame… but at least the three detachment limit helps a bit. We really have to fear for the hobby when the IK book gets released though- an imbalance on the relatively affordable super heavies in that book can leave the entire Xenos selection in the dust
I find it funny that people were saying “codexes will make people want to go pure”. Hah, codexes are actually one of the incentives to mix: artifact and trait from one army, stratagems from another, psychic powers from the third…
Right. I think the rumored/wishlisted “To be Battleforged your army needs to share 2 keywords” would have put an end to soup.
Honestly, at this point I feel it might come to the ITC to make a “Tournament Play” stricter subset of Matched Play, up to and including ban lists. GW clearly won’t do it, and just modifying Matched Play itself is too broad as Matched Play gets used for more than competitive games; for example, I think that Objective Secured (yes I know it came in codexes before CA, just hypothesizing) should have been a “Tournament Play” rule. Same with the flyer rule; it was broken in tournaments, not in regular games.
If GW won’t do this, then ITC is the only hope being “the” tournament standard for 40k.
To expand further, I feel the whole “3 ways to play” is silly and isn’t even really needed.
First, Open Play is almost by definition “do whatever you want” which you could already do with your opponent’s permission anyways, and a lot of fun gets to be had when you just kind of ad-hoc things on the fly.
Narrative Play really seems to mean “asymmetrical scenarios” i.e. attacker/defender, where each force has it’s own objective rather than a common set of goals. Sure you have things like Planetstrike, Stronghold Assault and the like, but ultimately these are just ways to play the game in such a way that you aren’t necessarily looking for even forces and the same objectives; it’s not even a Power Rating vs. Points thing, as narrative play can (and often does) also support points.
The reverse of Narrative, matched play seems to really mean “symmetrical forces”. Same points (not exclusive to matched play), same objectives or type of objectives, symmetrical missions. I think the largest stigma here is the fact GW touts it as being “balanced” which indicates the other styles of play are not balanced (which they may not be out of the box, but this is more or less preying upon people’s fear of having an imbalanced game which is 99% of the time equated with being not fun).
Really, there is nothing exclusive about Matched and Narrative play other than the mission types they would prefer, while Open Play is really just codifying the option that already existed of modifying the rules as you see fit, which you could always do so I don’t get why they need to put it into words.
What I do think is missing though, is what I alluded to above: The hypothetical “Tournament Play” variant, which would be much stricter subset of the base Matched Play rules to try and balance things not only in the context of structured play, but specifically for competitive events. Here is where you put things like the rule of 1s, flyers not being able to hold objectives, the 50% reserve rule, all things that could easily break a tournament, but generally speaking aren’t issues for pickup games. This would further let GW adjust the balance of the game rules to help fix tournaments, but not have the effects trickle down to matched play. The Commissar nerf, for example, might have been applied only to Tournament Play. Same with the Ynnari nerf; it was not being abused in Matched Play itself so much as it was being abused in tournaments. Tournaments should really be seen as a variant of Matched Play, not the focus of Matched Play itself. There should be common changes (points values, for example) but there should also be the freedom to adjust things to help fix tournament balance without it impacting every Matched Play game.
Sorry for the long-winded post 🙂
3 of those are soups? Nids and Eldar are both soups… don’t forget Nids can ally in GSC and Astra Militarum (GSC.) We will need the GSC book to see if the GSC rules add a lot to Astra Militarum units or not though… But similarly there is only one real Eldar Codex at present.
Nanavati had pure Tyranids, not sure what you’re referring to.
Tyranids can’t soup with anyone. If we bring mix GSC into a detachment, we lose the adaptations, because only 1 keyword in common. We can’t even buff between detachments post CA.
Thanks for having me on, Petey. We’ve also decided to run an ITC RTT on day 2 for folks dropping from the main event!
Thanks
=A=
I’d like to add that making Xenos codexes just straight up stronger is not the right way to go.
This leaves non-soup imperium/chaos armies behind.
Why do you think the increases to Guilliman and razorbacks are warranted when we don’t see any of them at top tables? Storm ravens needed a nerf but fire raptors did not need to go down in points.
Also, alpha strike and non-LOS shooting still seem to be overpowered. Any suggestions for dealing with these?
Also, what about the omissions of point increases to oblits, changeling and other top meta spam lists?