Kirby: 7th Edition Scoring

Now we have no idea what 90% of the rules are like and a lot of this may change as we find out more but with pictures identifying more information on the FoC and contesting / Troops bonuses, I thought we’d take a peak at potential changes to the most important thing for the past two editions – objectives.

One of the major issues that started to evolve with 6th edition was the FoC became next to useless. 7th right away throws the Unbound at us – cue groans from everyone one in a game where literally “anything goes.” As this trickles into our psyche we’re treated with several other rumor tidbits…

1. Unbound lists cannot contest
2. Everything scores
3. Bound lists (Combined Arms Detachment) gain Troops with Objective Secured (if they own an objective only other units with this rule can contest the objective)

Digressing, Unbound is likely not going to be allowed in competitive play anyway. I know many of us don’t care about that but general human nature will keep the silly down in Unbound games. What I really want to focus on is the change to scoring. We don’t know yet what the objective deck things are going to be like but we haven’t seen anything moving away from the objective based game we’ve had from 4th edition onwards. 

So two very large changes we know of already. Everything scores takes us back to 4th edition where Troops were maligned generally for not being the best options (they generally aren’t efficient, don’t bring specialities to the table, weren’t needed for scoring, etc.). This generally left armies with really small Troops options in search of better units in Elites / Fast Attack / Heavy Support who could also score. There were exceptions obviously but there was very little incentive to take Troops outside of your standard two. 5th and 6th changed that – they were the only way you won objective based missions without falling back on secondaries or other winning parameters tournaments may have implemented and we began to see Troops become a lot more common and armies have to accommodate this in list building.  

7th is saying whatever man, you don’t need your Troops. EVERYTHING scores. Everything contests. This will send a lot of armies sliding back to a more min/max concept where Troops are marginalised for the better units in other slots; ergo 4th edition style lists. 

This is then challenged with the Objective Secured rule. If a Troops unit from a CAD army is on an objective – nothing contests that objective except other units with Objective Secured (so far only Troops from CAD armies). Now having a small squad of Troops hiding in a corner with a hard to get to objective is much more likely to be easy money as fast contesting options rarely come in Troops (Eldar Jetbikes excepted…) or a large durable Troops unit in midfield, or a fast contesting Troop which can move quickly, etc. These options now become very handy to know they are a much more potent scoring option compared to your Broadsides, Sternguard, Venomthropes, etc. 

Now we have an incentive to take Troops – this is a game design mechanic I like. You as the list builder have a choice; go for harder to contest but often not as good Troops or go for  minimal Troops and get better options. Each of these choices is different based upon the army you are running – a Biker Space Marine army is quite happy to go for more Troops as they are a solid option and fast while a Tau army might decide less Troops and more scoring guns is better and use mobility and shooting power to beat off more Troop-centric armies. 

This is something you control rather than a random game mechanic which is nice. Again, we don’t know a lot of the exact information which will impact upon how this is implemented (will scoring be as necessary?) but if all things stay equal, these new rules will make a big impact on how lists look from 6th to 7th.