Zero Comp: Adepticon Mission analysis by Reece Robbins

I had the opportunity to play through the Adpeticon Primer missions at a 1500pt RTT a few weeks ago over at Game Kastle in San Jose, CA. Thanks to Janthkin for running a great event!

As an avid tournament player, I was really looking forward to trying these out as on paper they looked like fantastic tournament missions. Initially what I was most pleased about with them was the way they looked like they would level the playing field and make a wider variety of armies competitive. They looked like they would accomplish this without resorting to player created comp systems which just don’t work very well.

The missions are more complex than book standard missions. Here is a link to the actual rules: http://www.adepticon.org/wpfiles/2011/201140KChampPrimer.pdf

They are essentially standard deployment types with a combination of book standard missions into one, occasionally with an additional victory condition created by the TOs. These three victory conditions for each mission all become “objectives” in their own right, with the player that achieved more of them winning the game. These victory conditions could be Kill Points, Objective Markers, or destroying the other player’s most valuable unit, etc. In the case of a tie on victory conditions, Victory Points (pg 300 of the BGB) would be used to determine a winner, with a 185 point difference necessary to declare a victor. Otherwise, the game would result in a true tie. Tabling your opponent is an automatic victory.

This creates missions that allowed multiple paths to victory as opposed to book standard missions where there is only one victory condition. Theoretically this would help to mitigate bad match-ups by allowing ways to play around another list’s strengths or your list’s weaknesses.

This really appeals to me in theory as it means that even if you draw the rock to your list’s scissors you could still find a way to win the game. I believed it would also mean that weaker armies could win games by playing to objectives.

In practice though, I found that there were some flaws in what I still feel is a great concept.

In general: Tie games should be disallowed. We had a LOT of tie games (even down to VPs) and this screwed up pairings. The system would be better, IMO, if VPs were a straight tie breaker down to a half VP difference.

Mission 1: Objective 1 and 3 are essentially the same thing. Both players are already going for KPs, so killing their opponent’s most expensive unit doesn’t require a change of strategy. What it does is make players want to be conservative with their most expensive unit. For some armies, their most expensive unit will be a shooting unit, so they have no change in their plans. For others, it is an assault unit that will be exposed to greater levels of risk. Making the destruction of this one unit a game winning condition is a bit much, IMO. I feel that it would be more beneficial to include a different objective such as getting a scoring unit into the other player’s deployment zone or including 2 Capture and Control objectives would make for a better mission.

Mission 2: Objective 1 is really, really unbalanced. Troops and their dedicated transports do not count for KPs. This means some troop heavy armies will have a near auto-win situation on this objective. Now, the good thing about this type of mission is that the other player can still try to win on the other objectives or go for VPs. However, it is still not a good idea to design a mission with an objective that is a near given for one of the players. Straight KPs would have been better, IMO.

Mission 3: Again, objective 1 and 3 overlap. Each objective should be unique. Switching one of these to a different condition would make the mission more complex and require additional strategic decision making on both players’ parts. As it stands, they have to do nearly nothing different to achieve 1 and 3.

Mission 4: This mission had far too many objectives markers required to be held to achieve victory. One victory condition required holding 3 of 3 objectives in your own half of the table, the other required holding 2 of 3 in the other player’s half of the table (6 objectives on the table, total). This really punishes low troop armies, which include a lot of weaker books (Grey Knights, Witch Hunters, Necrons). I believe it would have been sufficient to change it to whoever holds more of the objectives in each half of the table achieves the associated victory condition.

On the whole though, I really enjoyed these missions and with a few tweaks feel that these could be a gold standard of tournaments. By allowing multiple paths to victory, the smart player is rewarded and can overcome bad list match-ups. These missions may not be the best for new players due to the increased level of complexity, but for experienced players, they allow a far greater degree of tactical decision making.

Here are the results from the event. Obviously this does not account for player skill or the actual lists, but it gives you some data to chew on. The number is the amount of games won, 1 for a win, 0 for a loss and 0.5 representing a tie. Yes, there were a LOT of tie games.

After sending this to Mathias over at Adepticon he was gracious enough to send some feed back.

Many thanks for the feedback. We have gotten some of what you bring up from the numerous primers head through IL and WI over this past winter.

One things to keep in mind: The Championships ‘system’ really doesn’t work for one-off events that do not follow the qualifiers/finals format. I would absolutely recommend removing ties from a event that only consisted of one heat. The qualification/wildcards/

strength of schedule format is a must in order for this to function. The data I have from our 6 primers (around 360 games) is that the draw rate has been around 10-12%. This is much lower than the perceived draws that the Battle Points system generated. Of course we are of the opinion that ties/draws are an essential aspect to wargaming (both to in the ‘war’ and ‘games’ sense). The double-condition draw (as opposed to the single condition win) limits the amount of draws while still recognizing their place within the game. 

Our pairings have 4 levels of matching, the final one being a random seed. Do they produce perfect seeds? Of course not – if anything they could be viewed as ‘random within a bracket’ which is perfectly fine for this style of event. We have noticed the same issues you have when this system is paired with a smaller, one-heat format.

As far as missions. I hear you on similar objectives. We have a few ideas for Missions 1 and 3 to alleviate the overlap. Love to hear more ideas for a 3rd (non-KP, non-objective based) goal. The ‘oddball’ 3rd objective is the difficult one to come up with.

Mission 2/Objective 1 is no longer part of the mission. It was changed to straight KP.

Mission 4 – I like your suggestion. I was looking at something similar that involved 4 objectives. This one is based off the Epic GT mission (in fact this whole system was inspired by it).

One thing to keep in mind. This system is basically the old PST flattened-out and then mixed with the Epic GT mission. You are not meant to always win all 3 objectives. The idea is that players will sort of mentally determine what will be their Primary, Secondary and Tertiary objectives based on their opponent, deployment, terrain and their army’s strengths. You only need to secure 1 objective while denying/contesting the other 2 in order to win.

Also – these missions are far simpler that the old PST system in terms of language and amount of text one has to pour over prior to starting a game. Without question they are more difficult than standard rulebook missions….but they should be! Otherwise I think your analysis is spot on in terms of what our goals were with this system.