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Here Endeth the Cheese?

by Sonny the Zoo

"They bring a griffon, you bring a dragon. That's the Warhammer way".
The Unmentionables

So, I'm out of circulation for a while (on account of a difficult last business quarter that ended up with me having to cement a few relationships), and when I get back there's a whole new ball game in the Warhammer world. Seems everybody's talking about Comp.

What's the hubbub, bub?
Comp (or AC) means "army composition". Bottom line it's what you get to take out on the battlefield to play with, according to a set of rules.
Seems the WHFB tournament circuit has been in danger of overheating the past year with arms-race mentalities coming in to play, leading to army-selection escalation that puts the old Cold War to shame.
Big monsters getting popular forced some people to field gunlines. (Like Empire armies with more artillery than Al Capone's Christmas list).
You can't walk infantry up to a gunline, so lots of cavalry armies started appearing. Cavalry, gunlines and monsters being the norm, some goombahs went the way of the wizards and brought in more magicians than you can find on the Vegas strip on a Saturday night.
Pretty soon nobody wanted to go to a tourney with a balanced army. Who wants a series of games where you get your cahones nailed to the wall by extreme WAAC players? (That's Win At All Costs, to the uninitiated).

Nothing new here?
As anybody knows, there's a basic comp system in WH on the ground floor. Every army book's got a chart that says for whatever point limit your battle is, you get to take character and unit choices that have to be in line with the rules.
So the Games Workshop designers got that one nailed down then?
Nope. There turns out to be more holes in the system than there was in Toothpick Charlie the day after St.Valentines. Pretty much whatever-you-want is the order of the day…
12 Chariots with wall-to-wall magic and hard characters in charge? No problem. Unstoppable Knights ™ and nothing else? Go ahead, knock yourself out. Skaven shooting-frenzy? Squeak it to me. Wall of Undeath? Just get rolling them bones.

The (Mass)Debate
So, everybody involved in tournaments knows there's a problem. Some people are happy with it though, and some ain't.
First up you got the "Freedom of Choice" lobby. Their view is if it's legal according to the basic selection rules then what's the beef? Turn up for a fight and take a beating like a man if the cards fall that way.
Then there's the "Can't We Play Nice" brigade. Another set of rules that outlaw the worst kinds of offences would bring back fair competition, so they say.
Another faction says you have to "fix" the armies in question, not penalize selection.
Plus there's the usual don't-cares, don't-knows, and don't-follow-the-minute-points-of-WH-lore-you're-all-arguing-abouts.
Various remedies have been tried, either aiming towards straight restrictions or just trying to push players in the right direction.

A Solution?
The Warhammer Players Society who, outside of GW, have the biggest tournament operation in the UK, are trying out an AC system for one of their premier events in November. (If you've noticed Mike, Jon, William and Gareth standing around with papers, muttering about "points" and sadly shaking their heads - that's what that's about).
Rather than a "do this or else" list of what your army should be, the WPS have set out a scoring system for every army that rewards balanced choices and penalizes cheesy horror-shows. Your AC score can contribute up to a fifth of your overall total for the whole weekend's competition.
Lets say a player (who we'll call "Mr.W" for no particular reason) usually runs an army that some people could call cheesy. Mr W can take his usual army to the tourney - but his low AC score means he needs to do better in battles to compete overall with armies with better AC scores.
Mr W is left with the choice of keeping to his regular selections and to hell with it, tweaking his army for a better score, or going the whole hog and fielding a "fluffy" army.

Whadda I care?
If you're not playing WH in a major tourney sometime soon, none of the above affects you yet. If you don't play the game at all then what the hell are you doing this far down the page anyway? (That means you Hooper).
But - Games Workshop are keeping a close eye on how things are going AC-wise. They say that WHFB was only ever designed as a game to play among friends and was never meant to handle the kind of abuse that competitive play brings up. So the official GW tournaments have been suffering arms-races the same as everyone else's.
And the grapevine says that GW are looking to set down in stone "Tournament-Hammer" - official rules that would end up being used everywhere.
So, if you ever want to get onto the tourney circuit then get counting up them comp points now, and learn how to play with a balanced army.

Don't say Sonny didn't warn you.