Road to Adepticon 2012: Gaming the System

Well we have previously looked at the obvious requirement of getting your team together for the Adepticon Team Tournament.  I know, I know, we here at Team Snake Eyes are cutting edge bloggers continuously breaking new ground at every opportunity.

"Gaming the System" might not mean what you think it means.  I'm not referring to any sort of skeevy shenanigans that one might expect from lesser gamers, rather I mean taking at look at the Adepticon Team Tournament Rules and actually making a plan.  Shocking I know, but hear me out.

There are currently 120 teams registered for the tournament.  It is highly likely that there are other teams waitlisted since the opportunity to meet, and potentially play, me is unsurprisingly in high demand.  With this sort of competition it pays to have some idea of how you plan on getting as many points as possible.

The available points are as follows:

Battle Points (you know...winning the game) - 240 points (54% of total)
Commander's Heads (killing opponent HQ choices) - 32 points (7% of total)
Command Tokens (minimizing your use of special mission rules) - 32 points (7% of total)
Sportsmanship (not acting like "that guy" when you lose) - special
Appearance (paint your stuff you bums) - 60 points (14% of total)
Theme (do your 4 armies make sense together?) - 60 points (14% of total)
Tournament Quiz (harder than you might think actually) - 20 points (4% of total)
Team Spirit (how nuts are you about this tournament?) - special

The battle points are self explanatory.  You need to win as many games as you possibly can, by as big of a margin as you can possibly manage.  The commander's heads are also obvious.  Keep your HQ choices alive, and send the other team's HQ choices to an early retirement.  Each mission has a variety of wonky rules that adjust what constitutes a scoring unit and whatnot.  If you use your special rule, you lose a command token.  If you kill an enemy unit with a command token, then you gain one.  Your best bet here is to not use them unless you absolutely have to and kill everything your opponent puts on the table.  Sportsmanship is another category where you should be getting "easy" points.  Don't lose your cool, and work through any differences and you should provide an enjoyable game to your opponent.  Regarding appearance, I highly recommend reading the rules packet linked above.  You will be getting scored on overall painting, uniformity of your armies, detail work, highlighting, basing, and conversions.  The quiz is hard.  There's really not much more to say about that.  Spirit is the banners, shot glasses, costumes, etc. that some folks get into.  While this whole exercise benefits from large amounts of disposable income, this category in particular is just about how much money you are willing to spend.  Fortunately, it has no impact on your final score for the tournament.  Want a super-cool display board that shows the assault on the gates of Terra?  That gets you about 10 points.  Want a pizza box spray painted black with your team name on it?  That gets you about 3.  That difference equals about 1% of your total score and I don't even want to think about how much things like that cost.  While those kickass display boards are well...kickass, they are certainly not going to prevent you from scoring well if you don't have one.

In short, if you're at all interested in your team's final placement in the tournament, then make a plan.  It doesn't have to be as complex as entering into a land war in Asia, but put some thought into the enterprise.  To be honest, its exercises like this that add to our overall experience in the tournament.  If you find yourself at the tournament and wish to introduce yourself and/or your team, just look for this guy and say your piece.