Thoughts on "Remember December"

The club Flames of War event on Saturday was an enjoyable day. Full results can be found here, so I'll just focus on a couple of thoughts coming out of it.

I lost all my games, and only managed to avoid the wooden spoon thanks to my son winning his final game, relegating his opponent to last place in the process. It's fair to say that the Motor Company proved difficult to use. At 1000pts and having so many points tied up in the tanks, and with the small infantry platoons having a lot of firepower that is not available if you move, I didn't feel like I had many options to win as the attacker. And I ended up having to attack in all three games. I needed three infantry platoons, I needed the light mortars for an extra stand, I needed more carriers to give that mobile firepower, and I needed medium mortars for smoke and to give me another means of getting a pin. Basically, I needed a full Rifle Company in order to pull off what I was trying to do with a small Motor Company, and that directly stemmed from my decision to take the Shermans at the expense of all of those other things that I needed. But would I drop them in order to retool the list? Probably not.

One particularly good outcome of the day was Simon trialling a scoring system that completely abandons the official Battlefront victory point scheme based on broken platoons. It's a process that began back in the days of Version 1, by adding +2 points for a win to try and spread the table and reward winning a bit more. I don't know whether that practice continued and evolved through the years or if umpires generally reverted to using the official system, but at ValleyCon this year the rankings were determined by wins, with the VPs only acting as a tie breaker. Simon has now taken that to the next logical step, where it is the points value of the broken platoons that matters. The argument against this has always been the maths involved, but honestly it wasn't that hard to go "I lost 155 + 155 + 95 = 405 points". Still a little bit of tweaking to do, but the concept is good and the day was a good opportunity for it to be tested. A scheme like this pushes the definition of a "competitive army" far beyond just something that is able to win 6-1, and I fully support the change.