Hey everyone, Reecius here with an update to the ITC 2020 40k Champion’s Missions!
So, we’ve been hard at work as a community getting these missions updated for the 2020 40k season! Thanks so much to everyone for the input, play-testing and feedback, we really appreciate it.
We’ve got one more weekend of play testing left before we lock the missions down for the season and so have done our second round of revisions based on feedback. This is what changed:
- We cleaned up some grammar and clarified some issues with the wording on some of the missions.
- We combined Big Game Hunter and Titan Slayer into a single new mission (called Big Game Hunter) which awards 1pt for every 10 wounds cumulatively dealt to units with the Monster, Titanic or Vehicles keywords. This makes it far easier to track the mission and avoids fiddly, arbitrary break points where one unit counts for BGH and another doesn’t, and makes it a little less punishing for Knights which according to the data, give up a ton of secondary points.
- We altered the Maneuver secondaries to only be able to score 2pts starting turn 2 as we found it was too easy to max them early game.
- We altered King of the Hill to be scorable by Titanic units as Knight armies have a tough time picking up those points.
- We altered mission #2 as such: instead of placing an objective in your own deployment zone, you place one in your opponent’s deployment zone, 9″ from a table edge. To get the bonus you have to hold the middle objective and the objective you placed. We did this as this mission was giving up the bonus point too easily. This makes it more challenging but not as difficult as it was previously when players placed their objective in their own deployment zones.
Also, while the vast majority of responses on the new deployment style so far have been overwhelmingly positive, we have had some feedback from some that IGO/UGO deployment with no seize makes infiltrating armies or Marines too strong. However, we have data that shows the exact opposite and wanted to share it.
Thanks to the Falcon from over at 40K Stats Center for putting this together. This is the data from LVO where many, many thousands of games were played and show the win % of the listed armies in IGO/UGO vs. alternating deployment. As you can see, every single Marine army is better in alternating deployment with the notable and rather extreme example of White Scars. The most compelling part though is Raven Guard, whom many thought to be the most powerful in IGO/UGO deployment when in fact they are dramatically better in alternating deployment.
So counter to what many thought, Raven Guard go from the highest performing army in alternating deployment to very manageable in IGO/UGO. Every single Marine faction (besides White Scars) performs worse in IGO/UGO deployment. Melee armies interestingly, perform better in IGO/UGO but we think the re-roll on deployment map will help to mitigate this advantage quite a bit to hopefully prevent it from becoming problematic. Now, we should note the above includes seize but realistically the impact that has on the stats is going to be minor.
The other meaningful data point we have to inform our decision is from the LGT which ran IGO/UGO no seize deployment with ITC missions and on the exit poll had a nearly 98% approval rating on the deployment style when coming in to the event it was closer to a 50/50 on people thinking they’d prefer no seize or not. That is overwhelmingly in favor of the new system for people that tried it for 5 games in a tournament environment. As someone who played at the event I can confirm it was much more enjoyable, but of course, that is my opinion on the topic.
Thanks again for all the feedback! We have one more weekend to really nail them down and then we will lock it up.
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