Episode 47: Army Composition
20Jun09
I’ve gotten back into Warhammer Fantasy and I’m really surprised at the way that subjective army composition is scored on the tournament scene. If you play Games Workshop games you should really give World’s End Radio and Podhammer a listen. They’re both great shows from the land down under and have great, in-depth discussion about GW games. Podhammer is entirely focused on Warhammer Fantasy and World’s End Radio talks about the entire range of GW games and occasionally even games outside of the GW line of games.
Listen Now:
Standard Podcasts [ 6:27m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download | Embeddable Player | Hits (341)| Rate it: |
 Email it
|
      |
|
Hey mate, this is Jeff Carroll from Podhammer, I noticed you linked to my show and I decided to give your stuff a listen.
I listened to your army comp show, and I have to disagree on your opinions. Heres why…
First off comp is not about optimised vs themed armys. The army background/theme has no place in comp. Its optimised armies that reduce the ammount of skill vs armies that are effective but require actuall generalship and skill to use. Fluff is not a factor.
The other issue is unfortunatley GW WHFB armies are not balanced. Armies like VC and Daemons have a huge advantage over Orcs and Ogre armies. No matter how good you are at using an Ogre army it is at a major disadvantage when facing some of the newer books. Comp is in place to attempt to balance out those differences between books. The abscence of comp leads to entire tournaments filled with DE, VC and Daemons - boring!
As for peer judging or panel judging, neither is perfect. Peer judging can be influenced by personal factors and that gamers experience with your army. Panel judging works as long as the panel is made up of experienced gamers who know the game backwards and forwards and can accuratley assess an armies strength.
Anyway thats my thoughts
keep up the good work fellow caster!
Thanks for the comments, Jeff! You’re obviously much more experienced at Warhammer than myself so I will bow to your experience when you say that VC and Daemons have advantages over other factions. I’m 100% in support of creating a mechanism that discourages people from playing what I’ve heard Podhammer refer to as “point & click” armies. I just don’t think that scoring army comp (whether peer or panel) is the best way to go about this. We all know “that guy” who’ll do anything to win and he’s going to show up with his smashy-smashy army no matter what. Even if “that guy” takes a comp hit he’s still going to play that army and detract from everyone’s fun.
Also, I’d be concerned that people (like myself) who are new to the game and unaware of the culture of composition would show up with armies that they had no idea were frowned upon and become vilified and alienated when they’ve shown up with army lists that are 100% compliant with the rules-as-written.
Although I acknowledge it’s a lot of work, particularly with the number of factions that exists in WHFB, I think a better way to go would be for the tournament organizers to come up with army composition guidelines for each faction that compel players to show up with balanced armies. That way, army composition is objective vs. subjective. People may (will) still complain that the comp guidelines may not favour their faction(s) but, at the very least, a TO could respond by saying that the guidelines for comp were clearly laid out ahead of time so people knew what they were getting into. I think that would be much easier to manage than people asserting that they were “sniped” on comp scoring.
If WHFB could be said to have a failing, I think it’s that the army comp system in the core rulebook is too loosey-goosey and does not take into account any unbalanced combos that may exist.
So, at the end of the day, I think we can both agree that army comp is important to ensure that tournaments are balanced and fun; we just disagree on the means by which comp is enforced. Thanks, again, for your comments and for your show. I started listening to Podhammer at episode 43B and I’m working my way through the back catalogue!