Warhammer 40K: We Need to Talk About ‘Submarining’ to Victory
Adam here to discuss one of the thorny issues going on in competitive 40k – submarining to victory.
Although not a lot of events were going on there seems to have been a lot of talk generated this week over one thorny issue. At a tournament this past weekend a player was penalized for using a particular tactic in which they manipulated their score in each of their games. The community seems to want to take up the banner in regards to this type of tactic and there have been many discussions about it in various places. The tactic is called “Submarining” and this week we will look at what it actually is, the legal and moral elements of it, and what can be done about it.
What It Means To “Submarine”
Simply put someone who Submarines manipulates their score to be as low as possible, but still win a game. In most large tournaments having one loss usually puts you out of contention, which is why you still need to win the game. In order to achieve this, a player, once they know they are going to win, would do things like move units off objectives or “forget” to do an action so that they don’t score too many points.
Players do this in order to avoid having to play top-tier players or certain armies that they expect to see in the top echelon of the tournament. This type of strategy can backfire, however, if there is an extra set of rounds, like the Las Vegas Open, or if there will be more than one undefeated player at the end of the event. A savvy player would have to know at what point to score more points so they don’t fall into the trap of scoring too few points overall. This type of strategy has been around forever but does bring up a question.
Is It Legal?
As I just mentioned, this strategy does bring up the question of if it is legal, right, or fair? First off, this type of move is legal. As I have said, it is a strategy that has been around for years but has just recently seen the spotlight. Players of every skill level have done it, and currently continue to do it, in order to get a better placing in the later round. The real question is whether this type of tactic is in the “Spirit of the Game”.
In the tournament this past weekend, the player was penalized because the tournament organizer felt that it was not in the spirit of the game. Defining what the spirit of the game is can be difficult however many times one can tell just by looking at the situation. So the discussion becomes how one feels about this tactic. If you feel it is just part of competitive play, then it is all well and good. If you feel that it goes against the spirit of the game, and perhaps more importantly, the spirit of competition, you may feel that the player should have been penalized. In any case, the real questions is:
Where Do We Go From Here?
So what do we do about it? Do we really need to do something about it? If you are a tournament organizer and you feel that submarining is a legit tactic then you really don’t have to do anything. For those of us that feel that there should be a more fair way of running the tournament, then there are a couple of options. The first option is to carefully track the points people earn when they win. A lot of times it is easy to spot someone trying to submarine after the first few games. Unfortunately, this can take a lot of time and effort, especially if you are running one of the bigger events.
The other option is to change how we do pairings. The current system pairs winners with other winners but then uses battle points to pair players that are next to each other. This current system is what allows things like submarining to happen. If you use an app to run your tournament you can easily change the settings so that you use different criteria to determine who plays who. So if I have a setting that is based only on number wins, then randomizes – all the players that have the same amount of wins are paired against each other randomly. This pairing method doesn’t care about battle points so that no matter what you scored in your wins you may not be able to avoid playing against the local top player or army. I know I will be trying this out at the next grand tournament I run.
~That’s all for this week. I hope you enjoyed it. Let me know what you think, and how would you solve the issue, in the comments section below.
