# Comp restrictions cause cookie cutter armies and my thoughts on it.



## Darker Days (Nov 30, 2009)

Why? Why does a select few think that there has to be a set of rules beyond the main rulebook and the army books to help control what list you bring to a tournament? I was just looking at the Adepticon Warhammer Fantasy Championship information packet and saw that the players’ society rules were being used for composition. After looking through the restrictions on what points you lose and what points you gain for bringing a particular selection I thought what S**T. I don’t play this army but lets take Vampire Counts for instance, if you bring them heavy magic which is what they are you lose points, Dwarves another army I do not play, The army loses points for bringing more dispel dice. Hello Dwarves are an antimagic sort of race? 

The problem with this is you take a person or a group of people and not the game designers’ opinion and make it fit in this little nice box of their idea of how the army should be played. What then happens is you lose creativity and what an army may become what its potential could be just to min max comp points. I just don’t know why a game that has been around so long needs to be policed, there has been many tournaments long before this became some sort of standard and the game is the most widely played miniatures game in the world. 

I care about this persuasion as it should be judged on a 50/50 fact/opinion scale not this is the cookie cutter way someone says you should play. The fact part should be something like the number of vampire counts who place in the top 10% divided by whole top 10%. If the number is below the bell curve then award more points if the number is higher on the bell curve then award less points. Then the opponent judges 1 – 5 1 being the most disgusting list ever and 5 being a care bear list. If you vote one state a reason why. 

Sportsmanship is the hardest issue because of the sore-loser factor, He beat me I will knock him on sportsmanship so he can’t win overall. :nono: That is crap and unfortunately hard to stop. I would think instead of giving points there should be a check box at the end of the tournament of the people you played, put your in order of who is your favorite opponent was 1 being your least favorite to 3 being your most favorite. In a three game tournament 1 to 3 is used. In this way you are not knocking anyone but simply place them in order. The TO can check to see if anyone had received all 1’s and talk with the voters on why. One of the problems Sportsmanship faces is bias opponents; where friends vote for friends and sore-losers sac other players. I would propose that this score be used as a secondary tie breaker only to strength of opponent, which is not used in most miniature tournaments.


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## The Son of Horus (Dec 30, 2006)

Having run several tournaments, here are my thoughts.

On composition, I think the Player's Society rules set has the right idea, but for the wrong game. It's a lot harder to come up with a real power build in Fantasy, since so much more emphasis is placed on the player's decisions rather than the army's inherent abilities. The idea with the composition scores system they have is to try to bring even more emphasis on player decision and discourage the common power builds. Whether it works out well or not, I don't know, as I've never used the system and I've never seen it used, but am familiar with it as a point of being informed.

While sportsmanship is probably the most important thing in any game, I always have had mixed feelings about it being scored. On one hand, we're theoretically all there to have fun. On the other, for a lot of people, being "competitive" and being a complete douchebag that ruins it for everyone else are the same thing. We've got a pretty good group around here, so in tournaments I've run, I haven't scored sportsmanship unless there's a clear problem person(s). I've also taken the "judge's perogative" to redo someone's sportsmanship scores of their opponents if it's clear they're just knocking people to damage their standings overall. That's happened twice, if I recall correctly, and both times were before I decided it was easier to just not score sportsmanship unless someone was being a huge prick and most people, including the other judges, were in agreement.

The reason these games have to be policed is because there are sad, lonely individuals who find competitive gaming to be the only way of proving to themselves that they aren't a total waste of space. I've always been of the opinion that if that's the only joy they get in life, then that's their curse, but a lot of folks feel that those people shouldn't be allowed to ruin it for anyone else. Personally, I've always thought that if someone acting like a chode ruined the game for you, you might also be a bit too uptight about things. I mean, if the game sucked because of your opponent being a jackass, then whatever. Go get a pint with your buddies afterwards and make fun of them for being a sack of crap, and don't worry about it. It's an hour and a half at most of your time, after all, and in a tournament, there are two other rounds besides that. Usually, those kinds of people bring the power builds anyway, so you might not even have to suffer through a game with them for more than half an hour or so if you just don't give a damn.


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## clever handle (Dec 14, 2009)

The non-GW tournaments in my neck of the woods haven't used comp systems - but I've ran my army lists through a few that I've seen online. at 2250 I run a VC army with no ethereals, no regen banner, (4) blocks of skeletons and a single block of graveguard. I run 8 power dice and 6 dispell dice across three casters and have consistently been destroyed by comp. 

In one system in particular I tallied I ended up with a -6 out of a possible 20. The document explained that it was expected nobody would score less than a 5. This system gave VC a -2 (out of 20 - 10%!) for simply having a LORD at 2000 points...

I can understand why composition scores exist, though I haven't found a system that I think works well. Army lists are normally only about 1/3 of the game - the other bits being of course deployment and in-game tactics. I've seen orcs & goblins as well as wood elves lists win best general in the last year based purely on gameplay.

Around here the organizers seem to attempt to control power builds by adding unique scenarios which punish. Summon spam vampires? Hit them with a magic flux. Dwarven gunlines? Hit them with torrential rain reducing the effect of gunpowder, etc....


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## Tim/Steve (Jan 25, 2009)

I was pretty annoyed at the comp calc I saw when I ran my 2 armies through it. My HEs either have a star dragon or all magic (I havent found another way for them to actually do damage)., both combo's meant they couldnt get a decent comp score. Ogres couldnt get a bad score unless they didnt have any banners... and my army doesnt. This is just plain retarded since its much better for an ogre army to have 1 banner (somewhere to hide the tyrant from cannon snipes) then to have none at all... but having no banners was a -7.5 rather then a -1 for only having 1.

I was annoyed enough to find a second comp score calc and compared the 2... and they were plain stupid. Most stuff was similar, except that one gave a huge binus for taking a scrap launcher and even more of a bonus for multiple launchers. The other list had some pretty nasty -ves for even thinking about a scrap launcher... seeing as how a each scraplauncher requires a chain of 2 other units to be taken (except the first which can be a chain of 1 if you want*) it seems pretty stupid to score it one way or the other: if you take 3 scraplaunchers in your army then you've spent over 800pts on them minimum (3 scraplaunchers, 2 units of bulls, 2 units of fighters and 1 unit of trappers... all min numbers with no equipment).


*scraplaunchers are 1 per unit of gnoblar fighters/trappers. Gnoblar fighters are 1 per unit of bulls and gnoblar trappers are 1+1 per hunter


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## neilbatte (Jan 2, 2008)

comp scores aside the main culprit for cookie cutter armies is the internet, None of my armies are power builds but all score badly on most army comp layouts even my ogres which to be honest have enough drawbacks without losing points for lack of banners (which in msu is a liability) or multiples of the same unit (like i have a choice there are so few options to pick)
So many of the armies I see in random games and with freinds are just copy and paste armies from forum lists that exploit 1 aspect of the game whereas when I started computers were rarer and the internet not heard of so there were more variations as people found what worked for them rather than copying others.
The good thing about this is if you run an unorthodox list the copy and pasters rarely know how to deal with it as they have'nt been able to find how it works on whatever forum they've taken thier list from.
I often beat high end tourney lists with my fluffier lists even against people who are considered good players because they don't have the imagination to adapt to something unusual.


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## MaidenManiac (Oct 2, 2008)

Army Comp is standard in all Tournaments in Sweden, both Fantasy and 40k. Sadly the fantasy tournaments all use the shitty VPS system


The VPS system fails in a whole load of ways:
In its general that system wants all armies to play with a little bit of everything. Reality however is that except for HE/DE almost no army can do that. All other armies lacks something (in certain cases multiple options), be it shooting, magic, skirmishers, cavalry, flyers or whatever. This is usually compensated by using more of other things to make the army work, thats the way the Armybook was designed. This compensation is however penalized with the VPS system. Thus leaving many armies behind in their chances thanks to the restrictions on necessary choices.

I have organised Fantasy Tournaments for my gaming clubs convention BSK a bunch of years (not sure if I reached 10 consecutive years, too tired to ponder that right now, stopped a few years ago to pass the torch on), and used the VPS system for 3 consecutive years. Its a hell to use. People miscalculate all the time, so you will have to manually recalculate all lists, which is boring and time consuming. Its perhaps not that bad in a smaller Tournament, but with 70+ players that really sucks. This means that the first-round match-ups will fail (swiss style, first round paired strictly after comp, then comp is used as tie breaker so high comp always plays high comp if applicable, low vs low and so on) unless you have had time to count everything down before the tournament. You will also get a lot of "how does this work" questions to handle prior to the tournament since people want to read whats best for them, not whats written. Its also always sprinkled with loop-holes, which also makes it unfair in other ways too.
If you modify the VPS system, which is necessary in a varied amount of ways every time its time to organize the tournament (to dam loopholes and so on), the problems will multiply...

The easiest way of giving Comp in a Fantasy tournament is to do so subjectively. If you have a solid knowledge of the game its not hard to categorize lists into "boring as fudge cookie cutter list", "standard list+", "middle line list", "weaker standard list", nice list" categories with a bit more spreading of the field.

I do believe that some sort of army composition system is good. It makes lists more varied (see WHFB GT results for the effect on non-comped tournaments) and the game a lot more enjoyable for all players. Its also a simple way of letting players with the same kind of lists play similar opponents, so the booring cookie cutter guys can have "fun" with each other while the guys with reasonable lists can enjoy the game with each other, all in the same tournament:grin:


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## Darker Days (Nov 30, 2009)

I like the idea of comp being a way to pair players not hamper their scores. One issue I see is that when a comp system is devised it is an opinion bias of tough combos that the creators can find or figure out at that moment. This snapshot of broken lists may miss something so lists fall through that may be tougher then predicted. This also stops lists from balancing out their weakness like MaidenManiac said 

_"All other armies lacks something (in certain cases multiple options), be it shooting, magic, skirmishers, cavalry, flyers or whatever. This is usually compensated by using more of other things to make the army work, that’s the way the Army book was designed. This compensation is however penalized with the VPS system. Thus leaving many armies behind in their chances thanks to the restrictions on necessary choices."_

Why not just let the company decide what is the way the army should be played and when they here the outcry from their player base or suffer from poor sales due to unfair advantages of army books they will post FAQs and errata’s or worst case reprint the army book. 

We play the game and usually we choose who we play but the tournament scene is meant to be tough the best versus the best. If you wanted to hold a tournament for fluff bunnies then the TO should create the lists exactly the same and let tactics prevail or people should play chess then everyone is on the same playing field.


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