Raze and Ruin - Comp Preview Part 1

I've had a few aborted attempts to restart this blog over the last couple of months, but just couldn't find a subject to get my teeth into. I may finish and release them anyway at some point, but I've now found a good reason to start blogging again - Raze and Ruin!

My very own tournament has recently been announced for this year - it will be on the 18th and 19th October in Leicester, and full details can be found on the TWF thread here. It will be 2500 points and 5 games, and it will use the excellent Tally Comp system that has been used at Rollcall for the past couple of years. Now I went to Rollcall, and I really enjoy this style of comp, but there are a few things in there that I feel need updating before I use it at my own event. I thought that the best way to get some feedback on these revisions is to put up what I am thinking here over a series of posts and get some feedback from anyone who reads it. This may backfire, but at least it will give me a chance to explain my reasoning for the changes I intend to make, even if no-one is listening!

As I've only got a few days to go before I go away on holiday to the good old U S of A, I thought I'd at least get these initial thoughts up here before I go. I'm going to do the generic comp in this post, as well as the first 4 armies alphabetically later today, and then 4 more armies each day before I have to leave. Then when I get back I will get to look at any feedback from these and get the pack together ready for a final release. I will put a disclaimer here that although I'm happy to get feedback, I'm not going to guarantee that any changes suggested in the feedback will make it into the pack.


Generic Comp

To get us started then, the generic comp scores. If you don't know how Tally Comp works, the idea is that the army lists are essentially uncomped in that you can take whatever units you like. There are no actual restrictions, however some of the more nasty units and items attract a negative score to them and some of the weaker choices get a bonus to encourage their use. These negatives and positives will be 'Tallied' (see what we did there? ;-) ) to get a final Comp Score for your list. This will be added or subtracted from your final Generalship score after all 5 games have been completed - so if you take the nastiest stuff you better win your games!

Here are the Generic Comp points used at the Rollcall event:

Most of these are pretty good, and don't need a lot of altering. There are three changes I do plan to make though, and the first is a Generic bonus for a combat character (not a spellcaster) riding a Monster. I want to encourage people to bring Dragons and the like, as they are brilliant models that don't see the light of day often enough in an uncomped environment as the die quite a lot to cannons. I don't want to extend this to spellcasters, as I feel that some spells are already good enough without them being mounted on something large and impressive! Thus the first draft for this will read:

+1 for a non-spellcaster character mounted on a Monster

The second change I am looking to make is with the negatives associated with big expensive units. In a standard comp pack, units are usually limited to a maximum of 450 points and I don't see why this is penalized in this pack. I think the other parts of the brackets work well though, so the new negatives will look like this:

-1 per unit that costs between 450 and 599 points inclusive
-3 per unit that costs between 600 and 749 points inclusive
-5 per unit that costs 750 points or more

The final thing is to limit one of the problems discovered at Rollcall with bonus units in Core. It was too easy to spam small, low-cost units that scored positive points when they came out of  the Core allowance, leading to some armies being a much higher score than they should be. To counter this, I will be limiting Core units that score bonuses to only score the bonus for the first such unit in the army. This should still let people get positive scores if they wish, but will stop some of the abuse of the system possible without this limit.

So that's it for the generic comp!  If you have any other suggestions, or responses to what I've written, please leave them below.