The crusade system is not a balanced one. The goal is not to create a carefully balanced experience, but to create a system for players to create stories and have fun moments. That being said, there are times when you can’t help but scratch your head at some of the design choices. Today we will look at a certain powerful oddity in the Astra Militarum codex. While some players focus on winning the game, a crafty Astra Militarum can focus on “winning” the campaign.
The Absurdity: The Great AM Experience Engine
The setup for the engine requires several pieces but revolves around the following Battle Trait for Officer units:
- Eye For Talent: If this Officer unit survives the battle you can select an additional unit to be Marked for Greatness
How does this cause an issue? Since this is a Battle Trait, that means multiple units can take it causing the effect to stack at the end of the game. Well, it will take officer units a bit of time to level up as there aren’t many agendas for them and they won’t kill much right? Yes….but…. you can just spend your RP to get an officer with 6 experience and the first Battle Honor for 1 RP using the Decorated Officer requisition (this includes Tank Commanders). That means you can start with as many as five of these officers on your roster. If you keep these units alive then, no matter if you win or lose, your army will have 6 units marked for greatness. You can lean into this strategy by taking surpluses in Military Intelligence and Morale using your logistics points. While this does inflict some penalties, you ensure that every unit in your army gets 2 exp after every battle and you get an extra agenda every game. This means every unit marked for greatness gets +5 experience after each battle before you factor in agendas.
But wait, there’s more! During your Tour of Duty you can focus on the Arming the Assault agenda which creates a ticker for each objective. You will need to focus on completing actions and keeping you opponent off of certain objectives. However, this won’t be too difficult as your opponent is unlikely to go take objectives they don’t need if they are already winning to screw you over. If you complete the action three times next to your home objective, one AM unit within 3″ of that objective gets +3 experience. If you get at least 5 ticks on your combined objectives at the end of the game you are guaranteed an extra commendation point too. You can also combo in commendations (after the first tour is done) to get more bonuses like +2 experience when marked for greatness (infantry only) and Merit of the Strategium to get a 50% chance of choosing to go first or second.
All this means that you can create an army that focuses on holding 2-3 objectives early in the campaign, and keeping your officers alive. You can get massive amounts of experience distributed through the army quickly leveling it up. If you manage one or two early wins, you could begin piling on crusade rewards that will make your army exceptional. Furthermore, this will make it simpler to get the super-tank commander (T9, max 6 wounds per phase, 4++ etc). This succeeds as it can place your opponent in the hard spot of needing to kill your officers for the intangible long term benefit of holding you back, or kill your units which are fighting to win the battle. The one thing to watch for is that you will be very vulnerable to the Assassinate agenda. This works even better on tank commanders and vehicles as the minute one takes a scar you can spend 1 RP to swap it out for an identical unit or any other with the same amount of experience. Oh your poor sentinel got a scar? Here’s a Baneblade with just as much experience!
How to Fix it:
I honestly would have made Eye for Talent a commendation of some type and limited it to once per army. You could also limit the trait to being infantry-only to make it easier to kill the characters. I would also restrict the Decorated Officer requisition to one use. The vehicle swapping requisition also needs to be addressed.
Conclusion:
I want to emphasize that the AM aren’t the only ones with stupid crusade rules. Many other armies need to be addressed. However, I feel like this interaction is not intended and can be limited to prevent it becoming too oppressive. The Ynnari and Dark Eldar also have experience engines that are powerful but they have limitations (you have to be Ynnarri or the DE one only works on 1-2 characters). regardless of your opinion on the structural problems of the Crusade system I hope I brought an issue to light that GMs can address before it becomes an issue in their campaign.
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