Armies I like to play and why I enjoy them

This article is intended to discuss why I play the armies you often see featured here. Basically there are three fundamental concepts I follow:

(1) Unique
(2) Character
(3) Fun

Second article on army composition scoring

Okay so I will continue on some more about providing criteria to judge army composition.

NOTE - Nothing seems to steam people up like the subject of army composition. While some people like it others are adamantly against it.

Riding the comp horse

Not that long ago I posted an article on comp and it drew a lot of comments from the blogging public. It's quite apparent there are a good number of tournament players that abhor comp in any size or shape. More recently I posted on various 40k forums the scoring system for the Bolter Beach 40k GT. A storm then ensued. Like I said a lot of tournament players don't like comp. Here is how the overall scoring system works for Bolter Beach:

Battlepoints - 55%
Comp - 15%
Sportsmanship - 15%
Appearance - 15%

So a total of 45 percent for your soft scores. Scoring for comp is open and judged by your opponents. There are three categories - two categories are based on your army composition (20% each of the total comp score and 6% each of your total score) while the third category deals with your army build (60% of your total comp score and 9% of your total score). I like an open scoring system judged by your opponents versus a closed scoring system determined by the TOs. You know what to expect with an open system and can build your army list appropriately. I feel that a closed system judged by the TOs has an unfair bias towards people coming from out of town. If you are a local and know the TOs then obviously you have a much better idea of what they like to see in an army and what they don't like as well. Let's be honest, people coming from out of town are paying a lot of money to travel and for a place to stay, an event shouldn't have a bias against them.

So upon stewing over all the complaints about our scoring system my partner and I decided to award the pair of golden tickets to the Vegas GT as follows - one will be awarded to the player who wins best overall and the other to the player who wins best general. Here is how our awards breakdown:

Best Overall - battle + sports + comp + appearance
Best General - battle
Best Sportsmanship - sports
Best Appearance - appearance (judged by a panel)
Player's Choice - voted on by players

This solution seems to have made everyone happy (knock on wood). My partner and I both feel it's important that everyone feel like they have a shot at a top award so this seems to fairly address everyone.

G