07-03-2014, 09:35 AM
Spotted this on dakka and as a lover of FPS games would love to give this a try at some point.-
Whats interesting is if you dropped down to 400-500 pts you could probably go up to 4 players, 2 a side.
Quote:Last night I rolled into my FLGS with my guard army for the first time in awhile, and wanted to play something different. I found a person to play with who has also had a fair bit of first person shooter experience, and the game we set up was akin to a "domination" game from that genre. It wound up being super fun, and I wanted to share how it worked.
The board was set up in a roughly symmetrical S shape with an objective on each of the ends, one in the crux of the bends and one in the middle with a lot of LOS-blocking terrain as befits this kind of mission with some other terrain set up for being able to fight over not just the S-shape.
The main special rule was that every unit in the game got IG's "send in the next wave", wherein if a unit was destroyed on your opponent's turn, you could bring it back into play at the beginning of your turn, and you can always, at the beginning of your movement phase, voluntarily remove a unit from play and put it back into continuing reserve. The only caveat was that only infantry units with no heavy weapons (excluding sniper rifles) or fancy way of getting onto the table (embarked in a transport, deepstriking, etc.) could come back immediately like this, while everything else had to spend an extra turn "waiting" in reserve before being able to be brought back on.
And, of course, when the units entered play, they came on the board from any objective you controlled (as if it was a board edge). Objectives were scored by getting a unit within 3" of one at the end of the movement phase, and then still having a unit within 3" at the end of your next movement phase. If that was true for both players, then the objective flips over to being contested, and neither player can spawn from there. Also, true to form, you can only capture objectives sequentially (though that could be changed if you want). Also, to make it work, ALL units counted as scoring.
The end result, was a game that was fantastic, and for lots of reasons.
Firstly, the game pretty quickly started looking like an FPS when on this kind of mission (or, actually like Dawn of War 1, actually). Instead of the game being one where you line up, each side fires a volley, and then you see who won, the game instead was much more of a grinding stalemate where the line of battle slowly moved backwards and forwards, with both players plotting and scheming and trying to time things right to get an advantage on their opponent. It meant that you could make mistakes, but then recover, and you sometimes wanted to mass push with everything forward, but sometimes you wanted to hang back and consolidate. The game felt WAY more strategic.
Also, the spawning system worked perfectly. You couldn't just hang back and shoot stuff because you couldn't blow your opponent off an objective and then take it after, because by the time you started advancing, their units were already back on the objective. Likewise, you couldn't just bum rush with crappy killing power and try and sneakily just take the objective (like jetbikes at the end of the game in regular 40k), because the objectives were easier to defend, and actually mattered DURING the game, rather than just at the end. The end result was that you needed to combine movement and shooting in an intelligent way and build your list to have different units doing different things and use them with synergy, rather than just looking only at the killing power a unit could put down (because killing power didn't straight matter when it was undone by respawning). Also, it became really important to time your attack with your killing power. You sort of had to think several turns ahead, rather than just thinking forward until the point where you killed your opponent's stuff.
There were a few other nice things as well. For one, it got rid of that annoying thing where your opponent could get just a little bit lucky and ruin everything. There was no such thing as a unit being killed before it got a chance to contribute to the game. Also, it made some usually marginal stuff less awful. Krak grenades wound up being really useful, for example, because usually you get killed before you get to use them, but in this case, the game requires you to get in close, and you have many chances of using the grenades. I also took camo netting on one of my tanks which likewise didn't stop the tank from getting killed several times, but it did occasionally block shots and at key times a couple of times. It actually felt like it was worth its 20 point cost.
It also added a new tactical dimension with the respawning. For example, it happened several times where one of our tanks was critically wounded, but you had to really weigh your options. On the one hand, that 1-HP hellhound without its inferno cannon was basically neutered, and you could always voluntarily remove it, which will allow you to get a fully-capable one back more quickly. On the other hand, if you leave it on the table, your opponent still needs to waste firepower on it, and that wounded hellhound still has its multimelta, and can still tank shock and block units, etc. You have to sort of consider all of the possible uses of a unit, rather than just the one you usually think of.
I suppose the last thing to note was our lists. For this kind of a game, you want to keep things rather small - enough to get roughly one fancy toy, or two if you're willing to bet on such a low-unit strategy, which actually matters in this mission. Furthermore, you've got to balance having several cheap units with bad guns to quickly respawn against heavy hitters who respawn less frequently, but are able to actually kill stuff. Also, because the movement phase actually matters, you need to actually consider mobility, but also weighed against the fact that they respawn more slowly.
What things looked like for us was guard on guard at 750 points. The only restriction we made was no fliers or superheavies. I'm sure that there's a way to make that work (say, they respawn even more slowly, for example), but we decided that things were new enough.
Whats interesting is if you dropped down to 400-500 pts you could probably go up to 4 players, 2 a side.
