A Swedish Comp

Convic is coming up on the 13-14 July, and looks like being the largest Warhammer tournament in Victoria again this year. I took a long time to decide whether I was going to enter, as I have been making a bit of a point of distancing myself from tournaments this year. In the end I decided to go because there will be a lot of people travelling from interstate for the event, and it will be a good chance to catch up with some familiar faces.

Having finally decided to enter, I then needed to sort out an army list. My original plan was to avoid fielding anything really competitive, however after fiddling with a lot of different concepts I hadn't come up with a single one that I actually found entertaining. I decided it was easiest just to give up and field whatever I felt like, ignoring its potential to win games. I have not yet submitted my list, but I think I have settled on what I am going to use.

One of the factors in choosing a list was that Convic is using Swedish Comp. It's been discussed a lot in the community, however this will be the first time that I've attended an event that actually uses it. I am generally a supporter of panel comp due to the flexibility that it offers, however I can see advantages to Swedish Comp, especially if you don't think you can get together a reliable panel of comp judges (which can be very difficult).

He may not be a member of the Swedish comp panel, but the Swedish Chef looks like he's about to come down pretty hard on that Demigryph... Err, I mean chicken.

For those not familiar with Swedish Comp, it's a long and elaborate document that looks at everything in the game and tries to score everything in a balanced manner. Obviously this is an incredibly difficult thing, especially when you consider that something rather weak can get very good when used in the right combination. The pack tries to identify and target these things as well, but obviously it's never going to be perfect. For the record, here is what I think of Swedish Comp:

Time to harden up

It's been a long time since I entered a tournament with a serious intention of doing well. When I first discovered tournaments (probably something like 13 years ago now), the natural approach was to enter the thing intending to try to win every game and finish on the top of the pile. After all, it was a competitive environment and everyone else was there for the same reason, right?

Over time I gradually shifted away from this mentality, and found I enjoyed events more when I didn't have high expectations. I fielded armies that conformed to this new approach - ones that really didn't have the tools to win every game. This meant I could still play properly, but know that the forces at my disposal were not going to see me playing on the top tables every round. It was a good compromise, even if at times I overdid things and fielded something so spineless that it was nothing short of frustrating to try to use it (I talked about this here).

As a general rule, using relatively tame army lists has served me well. The comp systems favoured in our part of the world helps this, and often sees me finish quite high up in the standings, despite being unable to win all my games. It's an approach I fully intend to continue with, but for the next couple of months I will have to put it on hold.

Explaining Comp

Cancon is run by the Canberra Games Society. Daisy is their mascot.

Cancon is an annual convention that has been running for many years in our nation’s capital, Canberra. For the last decade or more, a number of us (often around 10 players) have been making the 8 hour pilgrimage from Melbourne in order to take part in the Warhammer Fantasy tournament as part of the convention. At 8 games over 3 days, it remains the only tournament I have ever attended that spans more than 6 games, and is (at the time of writing) the only tournament I have ever travelled interstate to attend.

Relying as they do on volunteers, the organisers of Cancon 2012 were having real difficulty finding someone willing to run Warhammer Fantasy, and it was looking increasingly likely that no Tournament Organiser (TO) would be found at all. With time running out and our annual pilgrimage in peril, we (Hampton Games Club or HGC) decided it was time to take a hand in organising the event.

This year, HGC members have run a number of Warhammer tournaments: Empire in Flames, Book of Grudges and Axemaster (and Satus Bellum is happening this coming weekend). This accounts for a large chunk (about half) of the total tournaments held in Victoria. As a rule, these tournaments have had a few things in common:

• They have used the rules in the Warhammer rulebook pretty much without alteration (this seems to be something of a rarity these days in the Australian scene)

• They have used comp scores, generally determined by a panel of judges

These tournaments have been successful, with Book of Grudges actually ending up the best attended tournament in the country this year (take a bow, Brad). Players had fun and came back for more. As such, the decision has been made to use a similar approach for Cancon.

Within a couple of days of the Cancon player pack being released, I have already received a couple of queries from prospective players regarding exactly what we’re talking about when we discuss composition (or comp). The concept is apparently foreign to some players, or at the very least a bit vague as presented in the player pack. I confess the player pack may have been written in a manner that assumes the player has a certain level of familiarity with the tournament scene. Time to address this, then…

Going soft

As I stated in my previous post (Go Hard or Go Home), over the last 10 years or so I have been engaged in a constant struggle to reconcile my desires to use competitive and “soft” armies. This began with me being firmly in the camp of the ultra-competitive crowd, using hard-as-legal lists in an attempt to take out the tournament. However, over time my lists and I have mellowed and I have started to explore less powerful armies.

I have reached the point now where I don’t really want to field a list that opponents will see as really tough. I derive no real satisfaction from fielding an army that is harder than my opponent’s, and stomping them into the turf as a result. Unless I am going for a particular theme or performing some sort of grand experiment, I am most likely to aim for a comp score in the softer half of the field. I realise this sort of approach can affect my results, but by and large I don’t really care.

Deliberately selecting an army that is under-strength may be a foreign concept to some players. Why would you choose a weak army when you had better options available? Well, here are a few reasons why someone might choose to “go soft”…

From the vault: Go Hard or Go Home

Several years ago I wrote a number of articles on the club website, much of it not dissimilar to the sort of thing I have been writing on this blog. I may dig some of this stuff up over the next couple of weeks, provided that its content has not dated so badly that it no longer makes sense. First up though, I have an article that I wrote back in early 2007, but never got around to posting (the reason is lost in the mists of time).


And yeah, I seemed to use a lot of footnotes back in those days. I think writers in White Dwarf were doing it too, so maybe I was influenced by them...


The Elf and the Daemon

Donald hears the voices too...

Whenever I sit down to make a Warhammer army, I find myself in two minds about how I want to approach it. The little invisible High Elf on my right shoulder tells me that I should make a nice, balanced army. After all, Warhammer is a game, and I play it to have fun. My competitor is probably doing the same, so I should make sure I don’t pick an army that leads to an unbalanced (and potentially less than fun) game. But then from over my left shoulder comes the (rather sinister and intimidating) voice of the invisible Bloodthirster, telling me that you play games to compete. Warhammer is a contest between two generals, and it is the responsibility of each player to field a competitive force and try to out-play his opponent. He also howls for blood and threatens me with his big axe, but that is neither here nor there.

The Vampire Count Conundrum

UPDATE: This is an old article which relates to the Vampire Counts book which has since been replaced.

Love them or hate them, they have impeccable fashion sense. And man-sized weapons...

The release of 8^th edition did remarkable things in terms of levelling the playing field for all of the existing army books. By the end of 7^th edition, there was a fairly clear hierarchy in terms of the strengths of the army books – all armies were most definitely not equal. The extent to which this was rectified in a single fell swoop by the release of new core rules and a few FAQs was remarkable – I would never have said that such a thing was possible.

However, for all that the massive power gaps between some of the books were largely closed, not all armies have emerged entirely happily. I think the single biggest victim of 8^th edition was the Tomb Kings book, however that was soon re-released, and the end product seems to be a happily mid-strength army list that does little to upset the overall balance of power. Maybe the well-documented phenomenon of “army creep” is finally behind us (dare we hope)?

Now that Tomb Kings are no longer on the bottom of the pile, I think the biggest losers in the current state of the game are their comrades in undeath, the Vampire Counts. This must come as something of a surprise, given they were in perhaps the top 4 or 5 armies toward the end of 7^th edition. To be relegated to the bottom of the pile so suddenly seems rather dramatic.

Comp

Ah, Greater Daemons. Nothing polarises opinion quite like them

For a number of years, Warhammer tournaments in Australia have included a factor called Composition. In its simplest form, Composition (or comp, as everyone refers to it) is a handicap system. Its intent is to provide a relatively level playing field in a game system where the army books (and even armies chosen within those books) are often anything but equal.