The Composition Conundrum AKA Comp Sucks!

This past weekend I attended the Call to Arms tournament in Wellington New Zealand. This was a 40K tournament consisting of 1500 point armies made up to 3 detachments. The composition score for this tournament worked by allocating between zero and three victory points per game, dependent on whether or not the army fulfilled specific criteria. 

The first requirement was to ensure that 40% of the army was made up of troops choices. This was quite a difficult quota to meet, as 600 points of troops for any faction is a rather large amount. As I play Asuranyi this meant I had to take 20 man unit of Guardian Defenders, one 10 man unit of Guardian Defenders, one 10 man unit of Rangers, one five-man unit of Rangers, a seven-man unit of Dire Avengers, and another six-man unit of Dire Avengers.

This left me with 900 points to fill out the rest of my army. For my HQ choices, I chose a Farseer, two warlocks, and an Autarch. These four characters end up costing me 300 points which left me with just 600 points to spend on transports and specialist units. Because of the inherent vulnerabilities of characters on foot, it was necessary to take a Wave Serpent. 

This isn’t really a bad thing due to the fact that the Wave Serpent is a very good unit in its own right and is arguably one of the best vehicles available to the Asuranyi. However, Wave Serpent’s cost just under a hundred and fifty points if you take them with their optimal mode optimal loadout i.e. three Shuriken cannons. I took two Wave Serpent’s meaning I had spent another 300 points which left me very little to use on my specialists. 

In the current meta, the Asuranyi army performs best when utilising flying units, otherwise known as flyer spam. Due to my lack of points, I opted to take two Crimson Hunter Exarchs. I would typically have taken a hemlock race fighter however the 210 points cost of the race fighter was beyond my means in this instance.

The second criterion required for the composition score was to take all of my army choices from a single codex. This limitation is rather tedious due to the fact that eighth edition 40 K is very much again of mixed armies, otherwise known as soup. However, these were the criteria and in order to reduce the handicap involved, I opted to meet them. 

The third and final criteria were to build the army from a single craft world. Obviously, for Space Marines, this would have meant building an army from a single chapter or if one was using Adeptus Mechanicum it would have meant using a single Forgeworld.

Anyone who has not had their head in the sand for the last three years knows that as an Asuranyi player there is really only one good option when it comes to taking craftworld traits and that is the Alaitoc Craftworld. The -1 to hit outside of 12 inches benefit associated with the Alaitoc craftworld is just too good to pass up. The only other contender would be the Ulthwe craftworld not because of the associated benefit of the 6+ feel no pain attribute that would be gained, but because of the ability to take the named character known as Eldrad Ulthran. In this instance, I opted for Alaitoc simply because when combining it with flyers the -2 modifier is just too good to pass up. 

Due to the restriction on points, I had to take the lesser strength star cannons loadout on the Crimson Hunter Exarchs rather than using the bright lance loadout. Normally the star cannon option is better than bright lances loadout however for this particular force taking bright lances would have been very helpful as my army was particularly lacking in high-strength weaponry. 

In my army, I had two strength eight weapons firing whopping (yes that’s sarcasm) four shots per turn. And in a meta saturated with Leman Ross battle tanks, Imperial Knights, Castellan robots, Leviathan dreadnoughts, and the myriad of other incredibly tough vehicles, two strength eight weapons is beyond mediocre. 

I decided to bite the bullet, suck it up or whatever other clichés you can use for being screwed over and I received the full quota of three victory points per game and decided to treat the whole tournament as an experiment as to whether composition scoring is actually valid in the current era  Warhammer 40,000.

In my first game, I faced a mirror match against Lara hold a late Jock elder. This was a good game against a rookie tournament player and despite his rookie status, he played a very good game. I think it’s fair to say that the missions that were used in this tournament were extremely erratic in their scoring at worst and wildly inconsistent at best. 

The irony with regards to this mission came in the fact that I made a rookie mistake by not properly reading the victory conditions and thought that I was scoring objectives at the end of the player turn rather than at the beginning which was the case had I read the mission parameters beforehand correctly I would have won this game however the cookie crumbles and I got little crumbs so moving on.

Game to pick me up against one of the best players in the New Zealand 40K community in fact in recent times he was the national champion of New Zealand. He was taking an Astra Militarium force otherwise known as Imperial guard. His army met the full criteria composition scoring and consisted of a bunch of battle tanks and a few artillery pieces coupled with a Scout Sentinel and some mortar teams. This particular mission was bizarre and featured a quirk that involved the playing area reducing by D6 +2 every player turn. I played the mission to its fullest in the fact that I used my vehicles to congest my opponent's deployment area causing him to lose half his army not to my shooting or memory capacity but to the quirk of the game. 

The outcome of the game was a draw which was good considering the calibre of my opponent. I consider a personal victory in spite of the actual score. In this particular matchup, I think I only really made one crucial error which was to place one of my Crimson Hunter Exarchs in a precarious position where it was not able to make it second 90° pivot and still land on the table. With hindsight, I should have flown my flyer off the table which would have meant it could have returned later in the game. Ha! A Eureka moment!

We live and learn I guess, and this leads me into my third game which is was again against the Astra Militarium a.k.a. Imperial guard. However, in this guise, they appeared as a spam list of hell hound flamer tanks and eight Scout Sentinel’s loaded out with Auto Canons employed to deny deep striking opportunities.  This mission required me to take 3 Characters and get them in the centre of the board and keep them alive for as long as possible in order to gain victory points.  I used my one of opponents Hell Hounds to my advantage by surrounding it in the centre of the board and subsequently wrapping it with troops and characters in melee. 

This meant that my opponent could not move the tank out of melee and could not shoot my characters or the accompanying troops. I then used my Crimson Hunter Exarch’s and Wave Serpents to systematically pick off his units one by one whilst employing my snipers to shoot his characters. The game ended after turn three with my opponent decided that enough was enough and he was happy to concede in the loosest sense of the term in that we were reaching the end of our allotted time period and he didn’t see the sense in playing another turn. This provided me with my first victory of the weekend and a final score of 7-1 which gave me a major victory in battle points.

Day two started with a horrible matchup which pitted me against an Imperial Knight, a Space Marine Black Templar sword brethren detachment and an Adeptus Mechanicum battalion. This game had ebbs and flows all over the place and although it ended up in a good victory for my opponent, I pushed him all the way and if not for a few lucky dice throws on his behalf it could have been a very different result. My lack of high strength weapons was pronounced in my both this game and my following game as I found it very difficult to wound the high toughness Knights and Dreadnoughts being used by my opponents.

 Moving on to game five which was against a lovely opponent who was using Chaos Space Marine force featuring the ultimate bad guy, otherwise known as Abaddon the Despoiler. This game was a great game that went down to the wire, and ultimately ended up in a draw when my snipers were able to dispatch his warlord in their last turn, which gave me the rather unusual record of one win two draws and two losses.

My final position in the event was 18^th out of 36 players. This isn’t bad considering the army that I had and my serious deficit of high-strength weaponry. However, it does highlight the fact that some armies are better equipped to run as a single faction than others. Troops choices were imperative to a winning list and this was highlighted by the armies that featured in the top ten. I can’t help but feel a little cheated by my results not because of the way my opponents played but because I was so limited in my choices yes I could have ignored the composition criteria but to do that would have defeated the point of the composition and to be down by three points against some opponents before this game has even started could have or would have been insurmountable in the majority of cases.

Thankfully New Zealand is slowly but surely adapting to the global trend which is to ditch composition scores entirely as evidenced by the proliferation of ITC tournaments that are now becoming prevalent in our 40K competitive scene. I welcome this change and hope that it continues as it will only improve our players and make them better equipped to face other countries in the international team tournaments that have become very popular in recent times.

The phrase ‘iron sharpens iron’ is very apt in that better players play newer players and teach new players the habits and techniques needed to compete at a high level. This can only be a good thing and I salute all local Wellington tournament organisers such as Hagen Kerr and Peter Dunn for adapting their tournaments to meet the demands required and necessary for New Zealand to become a force internationally. Long may it continue.