New Missions, New Objectives


Games Workshop have revealed their latest 7th Edition Rules teaser video today and it details some of the new missions we can expect. As we have known already from the earlier White Dwarf leaks there are a number of different objectives that change as the battle progress (through the card system). On completing an objective, you gain the victory points immediately.
In addition to this the screenshots of the video show objective points that in current Eternal War missions would only provide VPs at the end of the final turn. However, like the other objectives, these dish out their VP's at the end of a turn providing 1 point each.






Unbound & Changing the Way You List Build


Now for quite some months now my games of 40k have been using this system already. Victory points scored at the end of a game encourage people to build lists that just table your opponent. This was an obvious imbalance that we corrected with a 1 point per objective per turn capped system. Sound familiar? So I can offer some first hand experience on how this works out.

First there is a lot more focus on troops. Working out how to get them places and keep them alive. I moved from playing Riptide and Battlesuit heavy lists to having to put fire warrior teams in Devilfish. Now, the new force organisation charts allow more than troops to cap in Battle-Forged armies but they are still can't contest against troops. Unbound armies can't contest at all. This is important because a lot of the outcry is that people will make horrible spammy lists designed to simply table an opponent. This would be a genuinely scary set of rules if it was just using Eternal War missions. In the context of Maelstrom missions where VP's will be ticking away nicely for sensibly balanced forces, spammy forces will be less competitive.


Will Balance Be Ruined in 7th?


I am sure there are going to be army combinations and deathstars that are just way too OP. I am not sure 40k can easily get away from that without a complete rewrite of a very bloated set of rules. However I'd like to say it's not yet clear whether 7th is going to be a lot worse or a lot better in this regard. As I said in my first 7th dooom post, having unbound lists revealed without the context of the rest of the rules was unfortunate and has led to a severe over-reaction. It's going to be hard now for people to view the entire set of rules without an unbiased view from such a negative starting point. The new missions, a new allies matrix and who knows what else yet could lead to something far less horrific than has so far been imagined.

What do you think about this all? Still worried that list building will be out of control?


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