Jeffers wrote: ↑Sun May 20, 2018 9:50 am
From what i seen around here i find smaller point games can be crippling if you kill that one unit or get 1st turn. Ive seen people tabled turn one quite frequently.
Personally, I don't have too much issue with this, narratively. As an example, I did play in a 500 point tournament with Tau, back in 7th Edition, where I faced off against a Black Templar player with a Sicaran assault tank (and not much else). It was an enjoyable ambush, seeing if I could engage and destroy the out-of-position tank, being escorted back to its forces. I won that game with a late turn series of blind luck, with my commander surviving a lascannon shot from the sponson by kicking up the chassis of one of his downed gun drones and using it as a shield to deflect the beam (1 to wound), twisting and bringing his fusion gun up, beneath the drone for one well-placed shot that penetrated (note, he had ceramite armour, which ignored the extra d6 penetration) and detonated the vehicle.
As a tournament, it was a little frustrating, with people bringing gimmicky lists like that, and the riptide list (imagine dealing with a Riptide at 500 points), which I also beat. I ended up tying for 1st place with a 12 year old kid who played a "point and click" eldar scatbike spam list (telling anyone who doesn't remember, exactly how nonsensical Eldar scatbike lists were), which was just another nail in the coffin of me playing competitively, but as a narrative scenario, I think it was, and would be, an enjoyable game.
Though the first turn advantage does need to be curbed somewhat. In Age of Sigmar, it's curbed by virtue of having a limitation on the number of shooting units, meaning first turn is often disadvantageous. In 40k, especially in 8th, with the increase in lethality of many weapons, a well orchestrated first turn can cripple your opponents ability to counter. Especially if you play a gimmicky list like "lots of heavy armour" or "lots of infantry" (which means you only need to target the portion of a "take-all-comers" opponent's army designed to counter yours).
Most of the time, however, I counter the first turn shenanigans with some good line-of-sight blocking terrain. And by good, I mean lots of it. There are so many boards where a single Leman Russ battle tank can relatively easily be position to see all, or almost all, of the opponent's deployment zone. What's the point? Where's the strategy in positioning then? Just plunk your big guns down and hope to get first turn. If line of sight is disrupted so much so that you'll have difficulty getting more than half your army able to fire at a given enemy unit, it's a lot harder to focus fire those key units on turn one, forcing you to move.
You'll also note the last two major apoc games done by Miniwargaming were done on two boards. By splitting the boards and forces up, it makes it harder for you to focus on key units like enemy titans and super-heavies. This is a similar concept to the use of line of sight blocking terrain to split up your firepower.
