Astro-light Tournament results

So I hope everyone had a good time yesterday.

Here is a breakdown of the results.



So Robyn was right behind Dallas for best overall. We had a large tie for best sportsmanship so it defaulted to the next best for overall. Dana and Robyn both had beautiful armies and it was really hard to pick one that came out on top. Dana I believe had more conversions overall, but Robyn had built an awesome looking display board! Paz won best general and was the only person to go 3-0 besides Dallas.

I hope everyone enjoyed the missions and if we do this again I will be doing more missions similar to the 3rd (Brooding Menace) to get more of a feeling of Astro.

Thanks Tom, Great event.

It was nothing like Astro, no cunty Tyranid player gave me 0 on sports for tabling them. *laughs*

Lore Weaver wrote:Thanks Tom,  Great event.

It was nothing like Astro, no cunty Tyranid player gave me 0 on sports for tabling them.  *laughs*

Haha, I know right. Or that SW player who every turn forgot to cast prescience till halfway through the shooting phase. I let him do it for 3 turns and he still docked me sports points. Sigh, some people have no class   

Thanks for running the tournament Tom!
But if I may offer my point of view on a couple things.

I loved the missions. Except for the brooding menace one. It may not be so bad but everyone should be on equal ground for it. The table wide nightfight was good and I don't want to pick on ian so I'll pick on tau being able to use their marker lights to reduce the cover saves granted by the downpour. Maybe next time have the downpour affect things like flamers, marker lights, etc that would ignore the cover saves. Maybe even refine it to even give cover saves to 12 inches s well. The rain doesn't carehow close or far you are.

Some of the tables were good but I saw 3 at least that sorely needed more terrain on them.

On the flip side I loved brooding menace, as me and my opponent spent the whole game throwing gene stealers at each other. It was Err Supply that gave me issue, as I had no ability to anticipate where the objectives were going to land beyond "inside 2' of the center".

I thought the spread was good.

Some armies happen to have a easier go of things in the unavoidable dark than others (Tau w\ Markerlights | Eldar Wave Serpents | Flamers / Torrent Flamers)

Astro missions are like that, some are good for some armies, some, not so much so!

Lore Weaver wrote:I thought the spread was good.

Some armies happen to have a easier go of things in the unavoidable dark than others (Tau w\ Markerlights | Eldar Wave Serpents | Flamers / Torrent Flamers)

Astro missions are like that, some are good for some armies, some, not so much so!

I can understand that, but when we are condensed to half of the games, having 1 army castrated by even 1 mission screws up the rest of the day. I'd be all fine with it if we had the 6 full games that Astro gives, gives more room to crawl out of the grave so to speak. And again, its not "fighting in the dark" with brooding menace, its "fighting in a torrential downpour". I'm sorry, but even flamers, or marker lights will have trouble finding their way in that. When 3 missions are all that's available due to time (and in our cases its time that prevents a full layout), then every mission chosen to be played should be "even ground" for every army participating.

Even in a six game event, you still get hosed. Just ask Mike and Tom, who both got hooped by missions at Astro.

Matthew G wrote:

Lore Weaver wrote:I thought the spread was good.

Some armies happen to have a easier go of things in the unavoidable dark than others (Tau w\ Markerlights | Eldar Wave Serpents | Flamers / Torrent Flamers)

Astro missions are like that, some are good for some armies, some, not so much so!

I can understand that, but when we are condensed to half of the games, having 1 army castrated by even 1 mission screws up the rest of the day. I'd be all fine with it if we had the 6 full games that Astro gives, gives more room to crawl out of the grave so to speak. And again, its not "fighting in the dark" with brooding menace, its "fighting in a torrential downpour". I'm sorry, but even flamers, or marker lights will have trouble finding their way in that. When 3 missions are all that's available due to time (and in our cases its time that prevents a full layout), then every mission chosen to be played should be "even ground" for every army participating.

Almost none of the Astro missions are "even" for anyone Matt. They are thematic, narrative based missions by their very nature. If you spend all your time trying to fine tune the missions to make them perfectly even for everyone chess is your game. Even in regular BRB missions they are not even (odd number of objectives, differently pointed objectives, Kill points, etc).

Could they be better? Sure they could. Was I going to take even more time to try and fine tune them? No.

Would could always use more people to run events. If you want to try your hand at one I'm sure someone would give up their spot (or even give you the reins and just show up and help out).

Seem's people think I am just bitching here about it, I am not. Was offering advice based on what I noticed/observed.

Being a tournament organizer is a pretty thankless job. You cannot make everyone happy. I was under the impression that advice was welcome.

Either way, thanks for running it, you did a good job.

Your first post to me was helpful and constructive. Your second post that reiterated you point and used phases like "having 1 army castrated by even 1 mission screws up the rest of the day", not as much.

I agreed with your premise, the missions can be very one-sided. However since I don't know if anyone here has the capability to run a two day six round event suggesting more missions doesn't really help. I also pointed out the only other solution I had was to fine tune the missions. After the time I had already budgeted just to get everything going, and making the counters for the last mission, I wasn't going to spend more time attempting to fine tune missions.

This isn't to bash on you or anything. I do want advice, but expect me to explain my reasoning.   

I will point out Matt that anyone else playing marines, be it SM or CSM suffer the same from marker lights, not just blood angels. 
Getting marker'd up sucks (Ian blasts me with dat shit all the time) but that's tau for you. If they didn't have punishing firepower they would be completely useless. And that very same list Ian played got crushed by other armies without rain.

The trick is to take out dem marker lights pronto so you cannot get hosed as much.

I love the astro lists because it mixes up the benefits. Every time I gotta play short table edges against guard, tau or eldar, I sigh, so dumb, auto benefit to shooty armies. Nice to see shit actually mixed up, I think I'll be testing out some other astro missions as well!

I have thought that the last several events (including last leagues final 8)have been really cool. Magnestism, cursed relic and The tyranids in the rain were a lot of fun. Our TO's deserve a pat on the back for the amount of cool ideas they have had.
I am waiting for someone to have 5 exploding objectives  in a game. That would be hilarious. I think I had a game against Mark  awhile ago of emperors will that had both objectives of the exploding variety. It was so much fun.

I've been playing this game on and off for almost 20 years now and i can tell you that during that time, never once was the game balanced enough for serious tournament play.
There is always at least one or two armies that take advantage of the current ruleset better than others.  I certainly feel your pain, as an owner of an army that waited two editions with a less than optimal book, and had it replaced with a book that Nobody wanted. But the game is cyclical  and you do the best you can with what you have. My game vs Paz was one for the ages, I lost and he had a single model with a single wound left on the table.  Probably the funnest game i've had this year.  Games like that remind of why i play the game, to have fun and socialize. Not one of us here is ever going to pay the bills as a competitive Warhammer player, and if any of us need the $60 gift certificate for winning That badly.... i dare say we probably picked the wrong hobby.

also, re: terrain. we do the best we can with what is available. What most here don't understand is that every Astro Mission is actually paired up with its own specific terrain.  Damnuition is supposed to be played on a destroyed city scape where 80% of the table is covered by dangerous terrain in the form of ruined buildings. Tom and I played on a table in Vancouver that had an attacker and a defender and you scored on how much of the table you controlled at the end of the game and the defender got a free battlecannon turret. (didn't turn out well for tom's Tau.. try claiming table space with your  attacking shooty army from an entrenched shooty army... see below)

In the pictures below, you can actually catch a glimps of the Damnunition  table to the left behind Tom's Tau, those Area tiles? covered the entire table(i hates it precious...)

The Astro organizers actually sum up the entire event here linky!

but heres the relavant bits.

Astro-dvs wrote:Competitive Balance:  We often say that a player will likely encounter one scenario that is ideal for their army, four scenarios that they have a fighting chance, and one scenario where they will be extremely challenged.  Of course, it doesn’t always turn out that way, but we’ve found that it is generally how it goes.   As such, it is very rare that a player manages to win all of their games – which we think is a good thing.

Rhaevyn wrote: Tom and I played on a table in Vancouver

And you seized!   

I enjoyed all the missions. Tom had links to the missions for over a month, so I was able to read them all ahead of time so knew exactlywhat to expect for each one. Thats why I went with so many scoring units in my list. If had to go against Tau in the genestealer one, I wouldnt have minded one bit. I would of just deepstriked everything in close but still..  if you were really scared about it or something that would have hampered your list with all your long range shooting, there was an astro warlord trait you coud of taken to eliminate the night fighting rule for that game.

For myself, I needed a bit more luck. Everything in the games went good for me in terms of shooting, saves..  I just needed the game to end a turn sooner against Jesse, or go an extra turn..   and against Dana I needed a turn 6 badly. Those genestealers put a monkey wrench into my advancement plans..     Jesse and Dana played great games though. Jesse was at a disadvantage from the second turn but wrestled control back by chipping away at my units. Dana's wolf lord did nothing the whole game except rev his engine..   but on turn 5 charged a terminator to secure a crate and win the game. There wasnt a lot of shooting or assaulting between units but a lot of moving around, guessing, etc. It really stressed me out not knowing where the crates were. I had to deep strike some units in and was trying to get a lucky guess by wedging on one side..  it backfired on me when all the crates showed up on the other side.

Its funny looking at the comp scores and seeing Dana's only scored a 13. Looking at it side by side with some other lists you think it would be a nice comped list..  nothing to wonky.

Im looking forward to another astro light if theres such aa thing.. Ill bring chaos for sure next time, even if its a comp 10 list.

Mike is a seize machine!

System Commander wrote:Its funny looking at the comp scores and seeing Dana's only scored a 13. Looking at it side by side with some other lists you think it would be a nice comped list..  nothing to wonky.

Dallas' list shows exactly why comp simply changes things. He scored a 16/20. My Iyanden list which is similar (but only has one wraithknight) is 18/20.

If Dana had Logan instead of the biker lord (or even in place of the runepriest) he would have saved 4 or more points. That wolf guard squad was 750 points of elites. And then he only had 150 for scoring which loses him two points. With half the elites going to troops he'd save those points as well.

Aegwymourn wrote:If Dana had Logan instead of the biker lord (or even in place of the runepriest) he would have saved 4 or more points. That wolf guard squad was 750 points of elites. And then he only had 150 for scoring which loses him two points. With half the elites going to troops he'd save those points as well.

I would have brought a better comped list if I had more painted figs. even at 1500 I was sinking points into stuff I really didn't need. 215 pnt rune priest to prescience a 115pnt long fang squad lol. Lesson here is to get painting more!

Otherwise this astro tournament was one of the more fun tournaments I have played in and the last few have been a good time so that's saying a lot. I like how no one had any Idea who had best overall before it was announced due to the painting/comp/battle points and Army list. You could lose a game and still have a chance at best overall if you put in the work for painting/comp/ army list.

Thanks for a great tournament Tom I hope you run this one again!

Yeah, this was very much Soft Scores: The Tournament, which is nice to have for a change every so often. It's also going to have the net effect that a lot more of us will have fully painted scores for league games for the next while.

I was chatting with Al the other day and remarked on the requirement for most of our tournaments to have three colors minimum. He was suprised we had such a rule but impressed it worked. I think the more tournaments we run like this, the closer we all get to having fully painted armies, which is nice!

Ps-Dana. How's that knight Titan coming along?

Dear Matt,

Sorry for rolling 6's at the least opportune time.

Sincerely,
Ian's Dice

But seriously, that last match could not have gone better for me or worse for Matt. Not only was I given all the advantages of the mission parameters thanks to markerlights, downpour, and shorter than usual deployment zones, but my dice, for the first time ever, decided to catch fire. I could do no wrong. This was compounded by the fact that Matt hadn't played many (if any) games against the new Tau codex resulting in a lot of "They do what?" which is usually bad news.

All I can really say is I hope Matt comes out to the next tournament and gets a better break. It'll be an uphill battle with the current Blood Angels 'dex but it would be interesting to see what an experienced Blood Angels player can do given a different format.

And while I'm here, much thanks to Tom again for throwing a great tournament. It's thanks to our TO's that we probably have one of the best communities in the world for doing what we love.

GingerBalls wrote:Dear Matt,

Sorry for rolling 6's at the least opportune time.

Sincerely,
Ian's Dice

But seriously, that last match could not have gone better for me or worse for Matt. Not only was I given all the advantages of the mission parameters thanks to markerlights, downpour, and shorter than usual deployment zones, but my dice, for the first time ever, decided to catch fire. I could do no wrong. This was compounded by the fact that Matt hadn't played many (if any) games against the new Tau codex resulting in a lot of "They do what?" which is usually bad news.

All I can really say is I hope Matt comes out to the next tournament and gets a better break. It'll be an uphill battle with the current Blood Angels 'dex but it would be interesting to see what an experienced Blood Angels player can do given a different format.

And while I'm here, much thanks to Tom again for throwing a great tournament. It's thanks to our TO's that we probably have one of the best communities in the world for doing what we love.

*grumbles something under breath*

In any case Dude, I may have needed that Tau-y eye opener. Jesse talks to me a lot about what the new Tau can do and how evil they are, and in all honesty I wasn't playing the list I should have been playing.

I keep going over that nightmare in my head and always come to the same conclusion, I should have taken my 14or15/20 comp list.... I want to rematch you sometime wherein I use a different list and see if I still get utterly trounced by it, or, if my Angels of Death can still contend.