Warhammer Fantasy Battle Reporter

Has anyone been to a tournament recently ? I wondered if the Daemons were wiping the floor with everyone ?

Um yea it's fairly common thing now.

Some grand tournament army had a Kipper and Skulltaker on a Juggernaut.

What's a "kipper" ?

Keeper of Secrets,basically fast and lots of attacks

Just got back from my 1st one yesterday was a single Daemons of Chaos army there. It finished 8th overall - but was lucky to get in as it had a terribly low composition score which shouldnt have really got past the judges.

Forgive my ignorance, but what are"Composition Scores" and how do they work?

Comp scores are a way of opponents judging how well put together your army is. If you cheese things out to the max (like nothing but units of 30 Horrors with full gifts) then you'll get a low comp score. However, this is not necessarily an unbiased system. Daemons tend to be considered to be a horrible army anyways and so you can end up with a low comp score no matter what you bring. Likewise armies like the SAD and Brettonian RAF get low comp scores because of how unbalanced they actually are and generally not being fun to play against, even in the competitive Tourney cicruit.

Sorry I don't know all the "lingo"...what do SAD and RAF stand for?

RAF is Royal Air Force, ie. a Bret army with lots of Pegasus Knights
SAD is Skaven Army of Doom/Skyre Army of Doom/Shooty Army of Doom

I've added a "sticky" acronym list under the Questions & Answers thread:-
Warhammer Fantasy Battle abbreviations

I'm confused about comp lists. Don't the rules account for the bonuses of an army list by the point cost? So why should a Bret. list with alot of Pegasi flys be penalized.

The basic idea with Comp scores is you want to ensure that armies in tournaments are balanced so every army has a reasonable chance of winning.

For example I could theoretically build a High Elf army with 15+ Power Dice that would annihilate you in the magic phase, or a Vampire Count army that was unkillable with 15+ PD.

The basic measure is the % you spend on each type of unit - Heroes, Core, Special, and Rare - is there a good range of each, or have you gone for the extreme and fielded say 2 small bare minimum core units and then maxed out your Special, Rare and Character choices.

For my Dwarfs it is possible to build impossible to kill Lords - Shieldbearers, Shield, RO Stone, RO Resistance, MR Spite, RO Sanctuary, RO Furnace - 0+ rerollable Armour Save, 4+ Ward Save, Magic Resistance 1, Immune to killing blow, poison and flaming attacks - these tend to unbalance the game as it turns into what they call HERO HAMMER, were people take big ubber killer lord characters worth 500pts+ and just hack through their opponents.

Comp scoring also rewards you for building good tactical armies that make best use of your army books strengths and unique items that sort of thing.

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Back to original question came back from my 3rd Warhammer tournament yesterday (my Dwarves finished 14th). There were 2 Daemons armies there one finished below me, the other in the Top 10.

I know exactly where both deadeye and kiwi are coming from on this.

Herohammer is a rubbish game and to be discouraged. It was like that for years in a previous edition of the game and it spoilt the gaming experience. Especially for me because my opponent was always a dwarf who could (as kiwi said) create ridiculously powerful unkillable characters.

I also understand where deadeye is coming from. One set of rules keeps it all simple and GW should cater for unbalanced units in their points cost.

I think employing these kind of competition rules is really just a nod to GW that they have got it wrong and that pts do not reflect power the influence of all units. It would be very difficult to imagine all situations and come up with a perfect pts system.

Personally, I prefer other types of rules such as:-

1) no monsters, charaters over 300pts or
2) no lord level characters or even...
3) no more than 1 magic item per character

things like that. I think comp scores are very subjective, I guess they are ok if everyone gets to vote on an army list before a tournament takes place but how exactly do you arrange that ? (you might not want them to know the army lists, magic items etc before the battles begin)