Kill Points, to me one of the major changes from when I used to play 3rd to playing 5th. I didn't get a chance to play 4th because of school yeah that whole college thing. Even when I started playing 5th I was still playing Victory Points until I went to a tournament and was on the unfortunate loosing side of an Annihilation game.
I was under the impression that we were playing VPs and towards the end of the game I was very much a clear victory and as I was adding up my VPs he was like what are you doing. Well taht's when I learned we were playing Kill Points and what Kps were. He had evidently designed an army of Orks with only 6 KPs total, I had widdled the Horde down to just a few Boyz left maybe a total of 100 pts while I had at least 500 pts still left on the table. But had lost about 8 Kill Points during the course of the game, mostly the usual sacrificial rhinos for getting those troops up close and personal ;)
Needless to say though I was a little bit upset over the entire event, being under the impression of a clear win and learning that I hadn't even come close. For a couple of months I refused to play KPs completely baffled by the reason why GW had changed there ways. I then started getting on the forums, one of which being warseer, and there were many people speaking about how refreshing KPs were and there use to keep min/maxing (minimum troops maximum heavy weapons) from occuring, not that I know I experienced it. But it must have been a horrible thing to have.
So I decided I'd give it another chance, still feeling like VPs are the more fair version. Over the weekend I played aginst my friend, and Anihilation mission using KPs, during this game I took quite a few casualties, loosing all but one JetLock, Most of my JetBikes and a couple wounded Vehicles with destroyed weapons and the like. But in the end I did not loose a single unit and was able to kill 6 of his, making the game seem considerable more in my favor than his.
In the end I still think that Victory Points have a better representation of the outcome of a game then just Kill Points. I've not experienced the balancing nature yet people speak of about kill points and the objective based games but for me personally I enjoy VPs more.
Needless to say though I was a little bit upset over the entire event, being under the impression of a clear win and learning that I hadn't even come close. For a couple of months I refused to play KPs completely baffled by the reason why GW had changed there ways. I then started getting on the forums, one of which being warseer, and there were many people speaking about how refreshing KPs were and there use to keep min/maxing (minimum troops maximum heavy weapons) from occuring, not that I know I experienced it. But it must have been a horrible thing to have.
So I decided I'd give it another chance, still feeling like VPs are the more fair version. Over the weekend I played aginst my friend, and Anihilation mission using KPs, during this game I took quite a few casualties, loosing all but one JetLock, Most of my JetBikes and a couple wounded Vehicles with destroyed weapons and the like. But in the end I did not loose a single unit and was able to kill 6 of his, making the game seem considerable more in my favor than his.
In the end I still think that Victory Points have a better representation of the outcome of a game then just Kill Points. I've not experienced the balancing nature yet people speak of about kill points and the objective based games but for me personally I enjoy VPs more.
There's quite a few people who share your opinion. I feel it adds an additional level of strategy to the game. It makes you consider what's in your army list a lot more.
ReplyDeleteHrm. I'm a moderate on this one...
ReplyDeleteA nice thing is that you have a known number of KP in your list. It has certainly done a good bit for reducing the amount of mix/maxing. However, I'm not sure this was really necessary as all of the modern codexes have been structuring such that this isn't really viable anyways.
Determining if a KP has been gained is a simple yes/no, so it speeds things up... at cost of dumbing things down. Some armies just can't compete in a KP model and are suffering for it. I also think VP allowed a more telling method of determining victory. It should mean more that you took down a 55-man IG squad, Monolith or other big nasty... but now it's just one KP. And forbid that you only killed 54/55 of those IG before the game ends...
A trend I've started seeing is for people to use a combination of both KP and VP. KP determines the victory but VP determines the margin (pyrrhic, minor, major, etc...).
I think my most lopsided victory in 5e was a 4 objective mission where my opponent had at least 60 models left on the board and I had 8 models. With a clever charge, I had my weaponless Sentinel pull him off two objectives (giant untouched mob of Boyz), had my squad of 4 guys run to cover one of those and my other 3 guys were on a third objective. This left me in control of two objectives and my opponent with one. My total VPs left on the board were not quite 130 out of 2000; my opponent was over 1000 points.
ReplyDeleteKill points can lead to some odd results, just like objective games, but I have found that im most cases a winner on kill points would win on victory points as well. And remember that low kill points equals low unit count. Take advantage of the low unit count, spread out and focus fire on individual units and those cool Ork low KP armies are suddenly much less interesting.