Delete Retreat!

There has been a lot of intelligent and eloquent discourse on retreat before. Discussing the pros and cons. While retreat definitely inelegantly achieves the idea of disincentivising just going full hog on killing in an objective centric mission. Most discussion falls well short of actually presenting a better solution.

Dead troops points are not open I believe. General point costs are fairly well known though so in our area asking to be reminded of the the rough point ranges of models to do some quick math about whether your opponent might be toeing that retreat line is acceptable.

Good luck winning many games with an army starting in retreat. Its such a minor issue, I'd much rather Hell lois was focussing his time and effort on something else.

 

Which I imagine he more than likely is doing... not like there’s a new book coming or anything...

 

Cannot agree more. Can we also have that dickery prohibited by the actual rules, and not by TO fiat?
Yes, this is a minor issue; I only ran into a situation with ITS handling of retreat once, and won't lose any sleep over it not being fixed. But if it can be fixed at all, I'd rather have it fixed than not.

1) Going by my prior experience with publishers - if a hardcover book is to be out by November 6th, then it is already about two weeks into the printing process.
2) I do think HellLois is a responsible adult who can prioritize his tasks and manage his working schedule just fine even when random forum users (for example, me) start writing posts on how some rules are not optimally written.

 

True, that said, a post that came with some actual suggestions about the problem to be fixed and more importantly how to fix it. Might actually make it onto the list.

 

Fair point.
Suggestions:

1) List should only be legal if you have more poins spent than the Retreat threshold. That prevents turn-1-in-retreat dickery. I'd suggest just giving a low-end threshold to the spent points, like "at least half of available points must be spent for the list to be legal", but that might be overkill (maybe I'm missing some hidden advantage to having unused points not related to going in Retreat).

2a) Make the moment the game ends not the "end of the turn", but "end of Game Round". That would keep the number of turns taken equal for both players in case the person going first starts his turn in Retreat - otherwise, he gets in one more Active turn than the opponent, and that's the only turn you can go for mission objectives that are not killing-related. The downside to this variant is that it allows almost the same "kill doodz, get turn for safe button pushing" situation if the player going second has a particularly good killing spree the previous turn.
OR
2b) Make it so that the player in Retreat spends his turn actually retreating and not objective-grabbing. For example, change the game end clause to have the prerequisite of the retreating player getting at least half of his surviving points over the table's edge (the Retreat in the core rules requires everyone to be evacuated or go null for the game to end). Right now, there's no incentive to not go for a suicide run on the objectives on the orders you can muster, since the opponent won't get his turn anyway; this way it is still possible to set up for a "sudden death" victory if the opponent gets too trigger-happy, but it requires a certain amount of scheming to both be able to steal some objectives and at the same time be able to evacuate enough troops to assure the game ending.

 

But thats the purpos of the retreat rule. You can try to grep objectives with the last remaining resources you have. Dont forget that you doesn't have much orders and model left and that there is no imp-phase.

We conduct this discussion every three month. If someone want's to play rampage, some ITS misions aren't the right playground for this.
There is always ANNIHILATION etc. left.

 

This is an sportsmanship violation. Do you agree?

As a such behavior, it should be AVOIDED by players and have to be PUNISHED by TOs.
For me, the discussion ends here.

Disclaimer: i don't give a fuck about "but the rules don't says that you can't", no one enters a (european) football field with (american) football gears for a frigging reason.

 

That that is a problem is without doubt. But you want to remove this rule completely, what's a huge difference.
Yes, in this special case has to be made a adjustment that you can't abuse this rule. But theres not a problem with Retreat! but with the composition rules for an army.

 

Like playing football and whining about overtimes...

 

You wan't to stomp your oponent into the dirt and grep the opjectives afterwards, I understood you before.
If you don't want a mission based gameplay the retreat rule from the core rulebook doesn't make a huge difference.
I assume that was the reason, why it was changed in some ITS missions.

 

This whole thread is just a troll and a platform for needlessly arguing. Posting something in a public forum, dismissing every response, and then demanding an "official response" before you will drop it are the actions of a surly, attention seeking child.

If you want to know HellLois' thoughts PM him - don't instigate a conversation and perpetually troll all who respond, especially those trying to make your post productive.

 

The retreat mechanic was introduced in ITS to stop players playing Annihilation with another name, yes, it might bring some odd situations from time to time and yes, it can lead to some puzzle solving 3rd turn, but.

The players are expected to play the mission not Alpha strike the enemy out of the board.

On another subject indeed dead models, not unconscious, have all their information been public.

 

Wouldn't a 74 point list not go into retreat until it goes down to 18?

 

You may want this, but HellLois is under no obligation to answer a question every time someone demands he do so. Most people seem to feel that although the system may be imperfect, the ITS retreat rules exist for an obvious reason.