New nids - new love

I have nothing to add to the news floating over the internet. It looks like Tyranids is coming soon. And I wand just to write something about it.

Release date is rumored to be 11 of January 2014 - soon enough. Pre-order is rumored to start at January 4. Three weeks left:)

I found a possible codex cover:

Looks great! It must be a hardcover book, I think. I'll try to go through the codex, gathering all the last rumors together:
 

Cultivating Warhammer 40k community in Belarus

A year ago I was a happy newbie. Today I generate ideas how to popularize warhammer 40k in Belarus :)

I made the first step and organized the first national team tourney on 16 November 2013. It was a good push forward for experienced players from one side and showed that our community is still too small. I think that we have a broad possibilities to grow up, so I focus now on involving new people with the warhammer 40k in Belarus. Here is my plan:

Belorusian Team Cube - 2013 results

This was my first try to organize a tourney and it is successful as I can see. Four teams from different belorusian cities took part in the event. Minsk, Vitebsk, Mogilev and Polotsk participated in the full circle game system. It stands for 3 games if we have 4 teams, actuaaly.

I round result:

Minsk – Vitebsk : 42 -  58

Polotsk - Mogilev : 64 – 36

II round:

Mogilev – Vitebsk : 44 – 56

Minsk – Polotsk : 44 - 56

III round:

Vitebsk – Polotsk: 56 – 44

Minsk – Mogilev : 54 - 46

So, team from Vitebsk won with all three victories under the belt. Team Polotsk finished second, Minsk placed third, while Mogilev right after the Minsk:)

Yes, this 10 cm Dice (the prize for the first place) is made of steel and weights about 10 kilograms:) 

Belorusian Team Cube - 2013

The reason, why i abstained from posting here is that I try to organize some tourneys :)

For those who are not in course of situation with warhammer 40000 in Belarus I’ll make a short report.

I suppose that we have about 50 players in Belarus and only about 30 active players. The average size of a local tourney is about 16 people.

Nevertheless we manage to participate in every team tourney in Moscow and in every European Team Championship past 4 years.

This year we managed to get 3 teams to the Russian Team Cup – that is a great step forward for our tiny community!

Now I want to make another big step and set up a national team tourney! I called it “Belorussian Team Cube - 2013” It will happen on the 16 of November in Minsk. 4 teams from 4 different Belarusian cities will take part in a tourney, representing Minsk, Vitebsk, Mogilev and Polotsk.

Each team consist of 5 players. The format of a tourney is a 1850 pts with ETC scoring system.

For people keen on army lists – check this post:   

http://rpg.by/index.php?s=&showtopic=16743&view=findpost&p=389537

I will not play at a tourney, so I’ll have some time to make some photos to write a report after the tourney :)

Deeper analysis of pairings with team Belgium

Team Belgium captain Tom Adriany presented me their pairings table for team Belarus so I did some more analysis based on it.

I post again the team Belarus table:

And the team Belgium table is here:

 

Team tourney theory - Advantage realization

In the previous article I discovered the situation, where you want to risk against more powerful, usually, opponent. But there can be different situation – when you have advantage in composition and don’t want to be outplayed in the game of pairing. So, this article is about “how to minimize risks versus less powerful teams”.

I showed that opponent can guess our champion to maximize points. So, it’s the worst case for our team, actually and let’s count that opponent successfully did it – he knows our champion! How to hold the ground if such a shit has happened?

How can we choose our champion?

Team tourney theory – Counter-champion

The game of pairings without champion’s game is a game with full information and can be calculated throughout. But when we have a champion’s game everything becomes much-much different. We have to take into account the unpredictable factor – enemy champion.

How can we choose our own champion?

1 – Defender as a champion. Most popular strategy is to play an allcomers army as a champion. So, we just stabilize the champion’s game and can focus on the game of pairings. The minus of this method – our powerful army is away and plays with some opponent’s army that can be not the best choice for the team and can decrease the outcome.

2 – Army without good matchups as a champion. If we have an army that we are not possible to use effectively – we can drop it from hand into a champion’s game. Possibly, it will be the best possibility to find average pairing for that army. It can be an attacker that has no targets or defender with 1 very-very bad matchup.

3 – The weakest army as a champion. Just to drop the weakest army from hand before the game of pairings main part.

4 – Counter-champion. We can try to predict enemy champion and set the best army to counter enemy champion. It’s the method to maximize the result, but if you fail to predict the campion – you can loose by much.